If you live in NC and have not voted, you can find a location where you can vote early here.
Well, at this point I think we can say one thing with a pretty good degree of certainty: hurricanes have a way of lowering turnout and discouraging voters.
Click on the picture below for a full sized chart.
Counties reported more votes cast on Tuesday, so Tuesday turnout numbers increased from 166,467 to 178,400. Still, on the same Tuesday in 2008, 213,659 people voted, so turnout at the height of the storm was down by about 16.5% from 2008, when presumably the weather was better.
So far counties have reported 169,430 votes cast on Wednesday, although as always this almost certainly is incomplete data.
On both Tuesday and Wednesday, the voters who were not deterred from voting are estimated to have split their votes about evenly between President Obama and Mitt Romney, so there was no real effect on the overall estimated vote margins.
Overall, President Obama leads Mitt Romney by an estimated 1,105,447 votes to 967,686 votes, a margin of 137,760 votes.
Now that the weather has cleared, it will be interesting to see what happens to turnout over the last several days of the early voting period. Will there be an especially large surge as some people who had planned to vote on Tuesday or Wednesday head to the polls?
There are lots of theories about why it is that Republicans oppose doing anything about global warming. We can now add a new theory to the pile - severe weather reduces voter turnout, and higher voter turnout is not good for Republicans. Therefore Republicans favor global warming for the same reason that they oppose same day registration, early voting, and generally anything else that makes it easier for people to vote.
Maybe the hurricane effect is not just about the weather. Maybe since the news has shifted to covering Sandy, people are thinking less about the election and therefore are a bit less likely to vote early than they otherwise would be.
Early Vote Turnout Charts:
In the wake of Sandy, Minority and White Dem turnout is no longer higher in aggregate than it was in 2008:
We can also see in the last day or two that White Republican turnout has been regressing slightly towards 2008, but it is still higher than in 2008:
Obama's cumulative margin did not increase further during the hurricane:
To some extent we should have expected that Obama's margin would not go up by as much as it had been doing, but you can see the impact in the daily margins over the past few days:
The ironic thing is that the lower turnout has caused Obama's estimated cumulative vote percentage to approach his 2008 vote percentage slightly more closely:
You can also see this in the daily percentages. Notice how last week there was a much larger gap between the 2008 percentages and the 2012 percentages than there is this week:
Previous NC Early Voting Diaries:
Day 1 & Methodology
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13