Dr. Michael McDonald, a professor at George Mason University, has a very interesting election project over here. He has been updating the site daily with the number of absentee and early voting ballots returned and, where available, the party affiliation of those ballots.
As of today, two states have enough information to create a snapshot of where we stand in those elections. Those states are the battleground states of Iowa and North Carolina.
Using crosstabs from the most recent polling, I have come up with estimates of where we stand in those states.
(more after the jump)
First, I want to mention that I have no tried to predict how undecided voters will go, so the results will not add up to 100%.
North Carolina
In North Carolina, the current early voting is heavily skewed Republican. According to McDonald's site, of the 78k absentee ballots requested, 52.8% have been from Republicans.
Party Reg
Dem 26.7%
Rep 52.8%
None/Oth 20.5%
So far, 9365 ballots have been collected in North Carolina. The party affilliation on the returned ballots is as follows:
Rep 49.96%
Dem 31.5%
Ind/Oth 19%
Using the crosstabs from the most recent
Purple Strategy poll, I've estimated the election in NC currently looks like this:
Current estimated standing in North Carolina
Obama 40.5%
Romney 54.6%
Keep in mind that absentee ballots tend to be used mainly by older voters, who do skew Republican. These numbers should change a bit once in-person early voting starts on October 18th.
Iowa
In Iowa, the breakdown of early ballot requests is quite different, leaning heavily Democratic. Of the 186k ballots request, 64.2% were from Democrats. The full breakdown is as follows:
Party Ballot Requests
Dem 119,318 64.2%
Rep 24,909 13.4%
None 41,366 22.3%
Other 154 0.1%
Total 185,747
So far, 3559 ballots have been returned. The party breakdown for returned ballots is as follows:
Dem 69.5%
Rep 13.5%
Ind/Oth 17%
Using the crosstabs from the most recent
PPP in Iowa, I have estimated the current state of the race as such:
Current estimated standing in Iowa
Obama 72.6%
Romney 23.7%
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Now, obviously, it is very early in the game. These numbers will likely shift quite a lot over the next six weeks. I will continue to update them as we get more information.
A note about methodology: The estimated number of votes a candidate received was determined by taking the sum of the total number of votes (V) multiplied by percent of ballots returned by party (B) and candidate preference based on polling (P).
Obama = V*BR*PRObama+V*BD*PDObama+V*BI*PIObama
Romney = V*BR*PRRomney+V*BD*PDRomney+V*BI*PIRomney
The (not very pretty) spreadsheet is
here. I haven't done stats for a long time, so if anyone notices anything wrong please correct me.