Early Voting Estimates: Obama leading McRat by (an average of) 23 points +/-

[npincus]

in NM, OH, GA, IA and NC, per polling done by SurveyUSA.


http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/obama-dominating-among-early-voters-in.html

We should caveat that these are not hard-and-fast numbers. Estimates of early voting results are subject to the same statistical vagaries as any other sort of subgroup analysis, such as response bias and small sample sizes.

Nevertheless, Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004.

Is this a typical pattern for a Democrat? Actually, it's not. According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.

Now certainly, early voters tend to be your stauncher partisans rather than your uncommitted voters -- just 1-2 percent of early voters in 2000 and 2004 reported that they would have voted differently if they'd waited until election day. So it's unlikely that John McCain is actually losing all that many persuadable voters to the early voter tallies.

What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers; the question is whether the Republicans will be able to do the same.

[skooooo]

1. Anyone else hear yesterday that a judge has ruled..

..that the northwestern corner of Indiana can vote early to avoid problems on election day? That's Gary, IN!

[TheWraith]

4. That's Lake County, our bread and butter in Indiana.

They're in the Chicago media market, meaning they know Obama a hell of a lot better on average than the rest of the country.

[elkston]

2. It should be clarified: These are phone polls of early voters, not actual ballot counts

Meaning, they are called and polled as normal, then asked if they have voted already and for whom.

Is this correct?

[npincus]

3. no ballot counts yet, just estimates per polling conducted by SurveyUSA

their methodology: http://www.surveyusa.com/methodology.html