The purpose of early voting isn't just to make it more convenient for regular voters, but to get more voters to fulfill their civic duty and actually vote. Both parties try hard to get their supporters to vote early so they can concentrate on getting MORE of their supporters to the polls on election day.
We've got enough early vote numbers in Colorado now to know that the turnout is going to be much bigger than 2010. The question is, are we getting a huge amount of people who don't normally vote in midterm elections to vote in this one, or are the big early numbers just an indicator that we're cannibalizing the voters from election day and just getting the same voters to vote early?
We now have some numbers that can give us a rough idea of what's happening.
The last Secretary of State report came out yesterday, and it showed this:
Dem 32.4
Repub 42.8
UAF 24.8
Well those numbers certainly don't look to good for the Dems. But the thing to remember is that the Republicans in Colorado have actually gotten really good at getting their supporters to the polls early. They won the early vote by 6.2% in 2010, and by 1.8% in 2012. But they lost both elections.
So I could only find one county that gave a day by day comparison of the early vote from this and previous years. That county is often referred to as The Peoples Republic Of Boulder. It's a heavily Democratic and one of the few sane counties in Colorado.
Here's the 2010 early vote:
Here's the 2012 early vote:
And here's the 2014 early vote:
Now if you count back the same number of days before the election, you'll see that 10/26/14 is the same as 10/29/12 and 10/25/10. When you compare these dates, you see that 2014 is going to be about half way between 2012 and 2010. After doing some more extrapolations I came out with about 41% of the people who voted in 2012 but not 2010 are probably going to vote in 2014. Keep in mind, I could only find one county, so far.
Now the early vote numbers don't come in the same from all the counties. Some counties are better at reporting, and some counties simply vote early compared to others.
So I asked myself, what if the current rate of voting were to be extended so each county total turnout were to look like the 2012 turnout, what percent of each party would end up voting? Here's what I found:
D 101%
R 120%
U 63%
Wait a minute! How can you get more than 100% of your active voters to show up? You can't! In 2012 both parties had turnouts in the mid 90% area. So what this is saying is, if the electorate was like 2012, both parties would be cannibalizing their election day voters, but the Republicans by more than 20%!
We see how Boulder county has increased its early vote turnout over 2010, so what would the party turnout look like if every county had the same increase in total turnout?
D 88%
R 105%
U 55%
Again, if the total turnout is somewhere about 1/2 way between 2010 and 2012, the Republicans are still cannibalizing their election day voters!
So what does all this mean? It means the Colorado Republicans have made terrific progress in getting their supporters to vote early. Now Democrats tend to vote later and many vote on election day, so we can thank the Republicans for making election day less crowded and making it easier for our Democratic supporters to vote.
The big question is, are the Republicans bringing in such big numbers of new midterm voters that their numbers will continue high up to election day? It's mathematically impossible for them to keep up their voting at this rate through the election. So when will their numbers start dropping?
One thing I've noticed, is that almost all the polls have a D/R/U split of about 31/34/35. That's absurd. The early voting is showing us this is turning into a real base election and there's no way the U's are going to be anywhere near the mid 30's. Every early vote extrapolation I've tried has the U's around 28%. And the only poll I've seen that was anywhere near that, was a poll the Udall camp released last week that showed the U's at 29%, the R's with a 4 point advantage, and Udall up by 3 points.
The Colorado Secretary of State releases early voting numbers on Mon. Wed. and Fri. The Democrats don't have to close the gap entirely, but they've got to start making progress, and I'm betting/hoping we'll start seeing some gains tomorrow.
This one is going to be one of the closest in the country and we can pull it out with GOTV! GOTV! GOTV!