Yesterday, I presented a case that the Republicans in Colorado are doing a remarkable job at banking early votes. In fact, they have been so good at it, that it's mathematically impossible for them to keep up this pace through election day.
I also suggested that you really need to look at the county by county returns and extrapolate to what is sure to be a much bigger turnout than 2010, to get a good idea of how well the Democrats are doing in Colorado. When you look at those numbers, the Democrats are behind by about 2% from where they need to be.
But if the Republicans are really just banking votes early, without adding new voters, we should start seeing the Democrats close the early vote gap pretty soon.
And that's exactly what we are seeing from today's latest Secretary of State report.
Here's the latest returns from the S.O.S;
Dem 32.5%
Rep 41.9%
None/Other 25.6%
And here are the returns from Mondays S.O.S report
Dem 32.4%
Rep 42.8%
None/Other 24.8%
So the Dems gained a full 1% and narrowed the early vote gap from 10.4% to 9.4%. In 2010 at the end of early voting, the R's had a 6.1% advantage. Can we catch them, absolutely! So if everyone continues to vote at the same rate as they are voting in this last report, 963012 Republicans will end up voting. The problem is, there are only about 950,000 active Republican voters in the state! So even after the Republican early vote dropped a full 1% from the last report, it is still impossible for them to continue voting at the present rate.
Colorado's bellwether county is considered to be Jefferson county. So how is it doing? It went from an R advantage of 8% 2 days ago, to 7.5% today. At that rate, it'll break that 6.2% R advantage from 2010. Remember, we won that 2010 race.
This is the early vote turnout in heavily Democratic Boulder county in Colorado, compared to the 2010 turnout.
Here's the 2010 early vote:
Now here's the current Boulder county turnout:
So what we're seeing here is, in heavily Democratic Boulder county, it looks like about 58% of the people who voted in 2012 but not in 2010, are now voting in 2014. This is good news since the R's turnout much better than D's in midterms, a similar gain by the R's wouldn't be as great as for D's.
So there's no doubt the Colorado D's will continue gaining in the early vote count, and will most certainly dominate on election day, the only question is by how much. And the how much is totally up to us.
GOTV! GOTV! GOTV!