I am one of 130,000 Franklin County (Columbus) registered voters who have requested absentee ballots in the past week. This is about 20 per cent of the total number of registered voters in the county.
I mucked around the Franklin County BOE website in a fruitless attempt to determine the party affiliation of the voters who have requested ballots. I am sure this information is avaialble, but I did not have time to find out the methodology to make this happen.
This is supposed to be a low turnout election in Ohio this year, but my gut feeling is that many people have decided that the stakes are too high to sit this election out. A high turnout election will break in the Democratic Party's favor, IMHO.
At the top of the ticket, I voted for Ted Strickland and Yvette McGee Brown for Governor and Lt. Governor over John (Wall Street) Kasich. Then I voted for Lee Fisher for US Senator over the Bushie Rob Portman. I voted for Mary Jo Kilroy for OH-15 over the banking lobbyist Steve Stivers.
So all three Republican opponents to our progressive candidates either worked for Wall Street (Kasich - Lehman Brothers, Stivers - 7 years a banking lobbyist) or were Wall Street leaning Congressmen (Kasich, Portman) not to mention an unfair trade supporting Bush appointee (US Trade Representative Rob Portman) or a Bush appointee complicit in the Bush budget deficits (Head, US Office of Management and Budget) so Mr. Portman can't be the piano player in the bawdy house, who when it comes to budget deficits says "I don't know what they do upstairs". (Thanks to William Saxbe for that one.) Can you believe a person with that record that he will do something about the budget deficit and jobs? Maybe Jobs for China and India, but not Ohio.
To make a long story short, this enthusiastic member of the Democratic Party has cleared time on voting day in November to work on Get Out the Vote activities, and to volunteer for Democratic candidates in close races.
BTW, the instructions on the absentee ballot requires that the ballot be postmarked by the day before the election, so I took my ballot to the post office and observed that it was hand cancelled, and I would recommend that all early voters take this step, only a very few minutes out of your day.
I have received evidence from our Franklin County Democratic Party that thier ground game is tuned up and in high gear on GOTV efforts. I will throw a few bucks their way to support that work.
I would recommend that all Democrats do the same. Good luck to our Democratic candidates and let's not let minor squabbles interrupt our efforts to thwart the Tea Party Republicans from their quest to return us to the policies of Bush/Cheney, and Herbert Hoover.