When polls in 166 precincts across Shelby County open Tuesday, Nov. 3, at 7 a.m., a shift in the city’s politics might be complete.

Given all the attention on early and absentee voting this year, the opening of polls on Election Day will be the final step in what political strategists have begun defining as not the day to vote, but simply the last day to vote.

That’s the message partisans — whether giving a Democratic or a Republican appeal — have been giving whether by phone, text or some measure of socially distanced in-person campaigning.

The bulk of the county’s voter turnout showing up for early voting in advance of Election Day is nothing new — it’s happened in the past three presidential elections. But the combined early and absentee turnout ahead of Election Day this time eclipsed the high-water mark of 2008’s 254,362 early votes by 71,673.

More importantly, it marks the first time the early vote in this election cycle has constituted a majority of the voters on the rolls. The election commission’s final early voting turnout number of 326,035 is 55.1% of the county’s 590,726 voters on the rolls as of Oct. 1.

This is the only election cycle, a presidential cycle, in Shelby County politics that regularly draws more than half of the county’s voters. In the past three presidential general elections, that’s been about a 60% total turnout.

Election Day turnout for the past three presidential elections in Shelby County has varied widely — from 38,925 in 2012 to 143,801 in 2008. The 2016 Election Day turnout of 99,422 also comes with the highest percentage of the three elections for early turnout. The early turnout was 70.9% of the total vote four years ago.

The local unofficial vote totals are likely to be in before the sun rises Wednesday, although it could be the predawn hours of Wednesday at the latest.

Shelby County early and absentee voters mostly women, Memphians, over 50

Whatever the turnout winds up being countywide, Democratic and Republican partisans both predict the county will be carried by Democratic presidential contender and former Vice President Joe Biden as Republican President Donald Trump carries the state and takes its 11 electoral votes with help from the suburbs outside Memphis but within Shelby County.

Surveying the national election map Monday afternoon, Nate Silver, editor of the national political data and analysis account @FiveThirtyEight, tweeted: “Basically everyone gets dumber in the 48 hours before polls close. You don’t learn much of value about how the election is going to turn out, and the zeitgeist/mood is as likely as not be a contrarian indicator.”

The proof of the bipartisan consensus on Tennessee’s non-battleground status is that Shelby County voters haven’t seen any campaigning directly by the two campaigns. Campaigning ended with the March Super Tuesday primary just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic that also ended most hand-to-hand campaigning.

The closest thing to even a surrogate finding his way here rather than to a battleground state was U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. Last month, Barr talked privately with law enforcement officers and criminal justice system officials at the Raines Station police precinct.

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The question is how high will total turnout go and what effect will it have on four competitive partisan races for seats in the Shelby County delegation to the Tennessee General Assembly.

Those races will be the truer test of where the boundary between red and blue — Republican and Democrat, respectively — falls in Shelby County. But comparisons of Trump’s Shelby County total compared to what he did four years ago are also inevitable. So is a comparison of Biden’s total as compared to what 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did locally.

Certification comes days later. But the unofficial totals will close out a campaign season that has its own unique story.

A day into the early voting period, an unidentified elections officer at the Dave Wells Community Center site was fired by the commission after he turned away voters who refused to turn their “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts and face masks inside out before entering the polling place. Another worker didn’t show up for work the next day at the sign-up table the two worked.

On to Election Day: A quick guide to the Nov. 3 ballot

Meanwhile, two popular endorsement ballots are missing from this election cycle under terms of a court order holding the two owners of the endorsement ballots in criminal contempt.

Special Chancery Court Judge William Acree ordered M. Latroy Williams and Greg Grant held in criminal contempt in early October for violating an earlier court order to cease and desist in distributing endorsement ballots for their Shelby County Democratic Club and Greater Memphis Democratic Club, respectively.

Local candidates — Republican, Democratic and independent — pay to be on the ballots and similar ballots that don’t use the term “Democratic.”

In lieu of 10 days in jail, Acree suspended the sentence in the legal action brought by the Shelby County Democratic Party. The local party argued the design of the ballots was too similar to the local Democratic Party’s ballot and could be mistaken for it by voters.

In the case of Williams, his ballot was part of an arsenal that included large campaign signs at key intersections that often billed him as the Democratic nominee for various offices even when he didn’t win Democratic primaries in which he ran.

Voting machines

This was supposed to be the election year in which Shelby County got a new voting system. However, the debate over what will replace the current touchscreen machines has been a major political undercurrent this election year.

The Shelby County Election Commission approved a new voting system that featured updated touch screens with a printout of a voter’s choices that the voter runs through a digital scanner and into a sealed ballot box.

The commission also decided to give voters an option of using hand-marked paper ballots to assuage the concerns of advocates of paper ballots. It didn’t have that effect.

Ultimately, Shelby County commissioners, a majority of whom approved an earlier resolution endorsing a paper ballot system, rejected the $5.8 million contract for the hybrid voting system.

The decisions iced a move by the election commission to buy immediately several more scanners to help process the larger- than-expected absentee ballot total Nov. 3 while leaving the rollout of the rest of the election system to 2022.

The Tennessee Secretary of State’s office provided federal CARES Act funding for eight new scanners in Shelby County just in time for the election morning count of absentee ballots to begin at FedExForum.

The pandemic, meanwhile, has focused new attention on other options that are a variant of hand-marked paper ballots — expanded access to mail-in absentee voting in a state where voters have to have a reason to request an absentee ballot and non-Postal Service drop boxes for the ballots are barred by state law.