There's seems to be even more focus on early voting totals, with the developing meme that Romney seems to be benefiting disproportionately. While this may be true in the country as a whole, the data I'm looking at from five of the key swing states seems to be telling a different story: that the Obama troops are getting out the vote
Here are my updated calculations on the state of early voting in the swing states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and North Carolina, Please check my prior diary (http://www.dailykos.com/....) for the approach I'm using to calculate these values, but the bottom line is that I'm applying the current percentages of support by party from the most recent five polls in each of these swing states to the early voting totals as captured in the US Elections Project site.
The interesting part of this is that allows me to estimate how well Obama needs to perform on election day in order to win the state. Below are the current values:
CO: 52.6-47.4% Obama; 47.1% needed by Obama on Election Day
FL: 51.4-48.6% Obama; 49.3% needed by Obama on Election Day
IA: 57.3-42.7% Obama; 46.2% needed by Obama on Election Day
NV: 55-45% Obama; 44% needed by Obama on Election Day
NC: 55.1-44.9% Obama; 45.5% needed by Obama on Election Day
NOTES:
1) CO: Boy, do Coloradans like to vote early: 60.4% of the 2008 total already; one poll I read today indicated that they expect only 18% to vote on Election day, with those voters favoring Romney 47-42. But 18% won't cut it, if 82% are generating a five point lead for Obama.
2) FL: Clearly this is going to be very close, but early voters seem to be holding their own
3) IA/NV: Early voting there seems to have either tailed off - or the updating of the results has slowed; NV has no new reporting today, but Obama is in extremely good shape there.
4) NC: More than half of all the votes cast in 2008 have already been cast in NC and the numbers for Obama continue to look good; they'll need to since people who haven't voted yet are disproportionately Romney voters.
Finally, though I can't really do these same calculations for VA and OH because of the lack of information about the party affiliation of early voters, using an average of the polls reporting on OH early voting (which has been surprisingly consistent (61-34 for Obama) points to a rough required vote of 47% for Obama on Election Day. That said, reporting from Ohio seems quite sketchy and slow right now.
Have a good weekend everyone.