Last night I had a conversation with a professional field organizer who is now back at school but stays in contact with the Obama team. He called to see how I found this year's GOTV efforts from my place in Colorado and to give me some items he has heard from his old team and colleagues.
He had noticed I had published some very accurate data on the turnout, much more up to date than what the Secretary of State provided the press yesterday. Then we talked what seems to be a concern that Democratic numbers statewide were a tad behind the Republican numbers. He of course said that the campaign is actually happy in that they have put this week's GOTV efforts squarely on the SPORADIC DEM's and ID'D Unaffiliated's in their universe, both of whom had voted in 2008 but did not vote in 2010.
He then gave me a peak of the internals that was relayed to him from the campaign and how this is looking more and more like the Bennet-Buck race of 2010 when Bennet won by 1.7%. He then said the closest that any public polling service has gotten to what the Obama team has seen in Colorado isPPP's most recent poll.
There are two things, first the Johnson effect which is going to come into play against Romney when the race is this close. PPP has Johnson around 2% which if you look at the Bennet-Buck race the two right wing candidates polled 2.4% (Green Party candidate got 2.1%.) But more importantly are these demographics. He said recall that Buck held polling leads going into election weekend but the RCP average was 0.9%.
Obama possesses a 51-43% strong lead with self-described Independents (considered roughly half of the registered Unaffiliated as we both know the other half are merely closet partisans.)
Even bigger and more important is Obama's lead with women voters, 54-44% and with each passing day Obama is picking up remaining undecided or flipping women independents 6/4.
The Latino vote is even stronger than women at 65-34% which the Obama team thinks is even a bigger margin in that 20% of the Colorado electorate is now Latino.
Now comes other items; voters by age: Voters under 29 years old Obama polls at a 60- 35% advantage. Under 45 it is almost a split with a 50-48% as is those between 64 to 45, 52-47%. Seniors over 65 fall to Romney 56-42%. Romney is not big on men, 49-47% and whites 52-46%.
He them pointed me to a
NPR article profiling Lynn Vavreck, a UCLA Political Science researcher who has been tracking undecided and women voters.
[H]as tracked a group of 44,000 self-described undecided voters all year, measuring who remains undecided in the presidential election. She says these kinds of voters are just less than 4 percent of the electorate...Vavreck has checked in with this demographic once a week since Jan. 1. She says those who still consider themselves undecided are split evenly among Democrats, Republicans and independents. About 7 percent have changed their minds (from Obama to Romney or from Romney to Obama).
Since July, undecided voters have been "as a whole breaking for Obama," Vavreck says.
"About 60 percent of undecided voters are women," she says, "and women undecided voters who have made up their minds are breaking heavily for the president — 75 percent for Obama, 25 percent for Romney." [emphasis mine]
In key swing states — Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado — the number of undecided voters comes out to about 900,000 people [again emphasis mine].
As irony would have I woke early on a weekend to watch my new favorite Political intellectual talk show, Up W/Chris Hayes where Professor Vavreck was the center of attention.