I am super obsessed with FiveThirtyEight. Not least of all because I love looking at the little pie chart that now says there's a 95.8% probability that Obama will win the election. Not to mention a 53.4% chance of an Obama landslide. YEAH B*TCHES!
Anyway, see what Nate Silver (who was hard at work just as early as I was this morning, apparently) has to say about the early voter turnout in swing states...
It's looking really good, people. The early votes show a MUCH bigger advantage for Obama than the state polls have. Of course, we can't take the early voting results as necessarily indicative of the overall election results...Nate says early voters are 98-99% strongly partisan, so it's not really those swing voters who are getting their votes in early...
On the other hand, in the past the early voter population has been older and more male than the overall population; in 200 and 2004, this translated to an early vote count that trended Republican. So what do the bright blue numbers mean?
"What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers; the question is whether the Republicans will be able to do the same.
Keep in mind that there are veteran pollsters like Ann Selzer who think that most of her colleagues are vastly understating the degree to which youth and minority turnout is liable to improve in this election; Selzer's polls have been 5-6 points more favorable to Obama than the averages in the states that she's surveyed. So while these early voting numbers could turn out to be something of a curiosity, they could alternatively represent a canary in the coal mine for a coming Democratic turnout wave."
All signs point to victory.