WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than 75 million Americans have already voted early in the 2020 election. In Kentucky, more than a million people have already voted. That's more than 60% of the number of Kentuckians who voted in the 2016 election.

These numbers suggest the U.S. could see a historic level of voter turnout.

Syon Bhanot, a behavioral economics professor at Swarthmore College, says he and his colleagues are describing what they are seeing as salience, the quality of being particularly noticeable or important. So many people talking about voting for many months has made the difference.

"Not just the coronavirus but everything that has unfolded during the course of this year, the Supreme Court nomination, all that kind of stuff I think has these topics very salient for people and the fact that voting, voting-by-mail, has been in the news for months means that a lot of people, it has crossed their radar," said Bhanot.

Republicans have put their efforts behind a multimillion-dollar digital get out the vote campaign.

Democrats have again deployed celebrities as surrogates on the campaign trail.

Bhanot says historically celebrity surrogates have only had a minimal impact but this is no typical election.

"We see evidence that when people don’t know how to construct their preferences. They look to role models. They look to messengers. They look to cues for how to act. Maybe this year more than others, you might see that this might matter more with people confined to their homes, restrained on what they can do. They might be looking for those cues. I suppose time will tell. The evidence from the research, as I understand it, is not so much universally positive impacts from celebrity endorsements," he said.

When it comes to encouraging others to vote, Bhanot​ says you can leverage the power of social norms. In other words — using old-fashioned peer pressure.

"Sometimes people maybe feel paralyzed a bit, the feeling ‘oh I have no control over this, it’s this big machine and there’s all of these people and how can little old me possibly impact the election as a whole.' Send out a text chain to multiple people and everyone sees who else is on the chain and you say 'listen, I just voted, can you just text back when you vote too?' The people you can sway the most are the people right in your network and we should all be taking lots of steps to do that to the extent that we can."