Check out by Michael McDonald of GMU. A good state-by-state analysis of early voting in the battlegrounds.
Obama has narrow leads in Iowa and Nevada, Romney has a narrow lead in North Carolina, and in the remainder the early vote is not providing a clear direction yet.
and
The patterns of early voting in Florida and Ohio suggest that Obama supporters are successfully overcoming limitations in early voting enacted by those states' Republican governments.
Details below the jump.
Iowa details (no surprise):
Iowa continues to firm up as more votes come in, now with 423,586 voted. Registered Republicans have been making gains on Democrats during the early voting period in terms of party registration. But on Monday of this week Republicans peaked among absentee ballot requests, at 30.9 percent. By Thursday, their share of ballot requests dropped to 30.8 percent. The Democrats have been losing ground, too, starting the week at 44.9 percent and ending it at 44.0 percent. The gain is among those who do not registered with a party, something I discuss below.
Romney needs to make up more ground than he has among the early vote -- or have a great showing on Election Day -- in order to win Iowa. Obama won the state by 9.5 percentage points in 2008, when registered Democrats were 46.9 percent of early voters and Republicans were 28.9 percent. Closing the early voting gap by a couple of points is not enough, especially since the level of early voting will likely exceed 2008. The Iowa early vote thus confirms the polling showing an Obama lead, perhaps smaller than 2008.
Nevada details (again no surprise):
So far in 2012, 263,782 Nevadans had voted in-person. In 2008 -- for the same number of days prior to the election -- 199,412 Nevadans had voted early in-person. In 2012, Clark County comprised 68.8 percent of those who had voted and in 2008 they were 68.4 percent. So, the geographic composition of the Nevada early electorate look similar to 2008, when Obama won the state by 12.2 percentage points.
The Nevada early vote thus points in the same direction we've seen in the polls, which consistently show Obama leads.
Although Republicans are doing better
in North Carolina than in 08, McDonald is hardly writing it off for the good guys:
Unlike Iowa for Romney, there is more opportunity for Obama to turn things around. The early voting volume is much higher than 2008, with 210,909 more people voting at the relative same point in time. So, his current lead, although smaller than 2008, may be more meaningful to the election outcome. Also, the state's "one stop" voting, where an unregistered voter can register and vote at an in-person early voting location, offers Obama the opportunity to covert more non-voters -- from a polling perspective -- to already voted.
In Florida, McDonald infers that voter suppression efforts have
not worked:
I hesitate to draw conclusions from the early voting in Florida and Ohio, other than to say that the election is close. These states are hopelessly confounded by the campaigns' mobilizing activities. But those activities inform us about the much discussed and litigated attempts by Republican state governments in these states to curtail early voting.
In Florida, 1.13 million ballots have been cast with 1.49 million ballots yet to be returned. The volume of early voting will thus likely exceed 2008, when 1.85 million ballots were cast.
Democrats trail Republicans 39.3 percent to 44.5 percent among mail ballots. At first blush, this is good news for Romney, but Florida Republicans usually win the mail ballots by much wider margin, by 12 percentage points or higher, and Democrats make up ground in in-person early voting.
Similarly in Ohio:
Cuyahoga County is providing easily accessible data. Election officials report that despite a curtailment of weekend early voting by seven days so far -- yes, although the U.S. Supreme Court allowed weekend-before-the-election early voting to continue, there has been no weekend early voting to date -- the number of persons voting in-person in Cuyahoga so far is 23,954, compared to 20,334 for the same number of days prior to the election in 2008.
Although we do not have apples-to-apples comparison with mail ballots, Cuyahoga and the other urban counties are poised to exceed their 2008 early voting levels. But so, too, are the rural counties. Many voters thus appear to be taking advantage of mail ballot application that election officials sent to every registered voter in the state.
Finally, his takeaway insight about the gap between requested early ballots and unreturned ballots? Those seem to be the undecideds, "a pool...perhaps larger than many polls suggest." Those RVs the Obama campaign aims to turn into LVs:
The early voting ground war will shift in the coming week away from banking votes of people who would likely have voted anyway and towards voters who are less tied to the parties and are lower propensity voters. This will be a critical time for the Obama campaign, since many polls show Obama faring better among registered voters than among likely voters.
So, let's get after it. GOTV's the word.