I just read the following at electoral-vote.com:
John McCain has had a run of bad luck this year ranging from little public interest in foreign policy to the Wall St. Meltdown just before the election. Finally, he is getting the ultimate gift a Republican could ask for: rain on election day. The forecast is rain and storm in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Rain lowers turnout and low turnout always helps Republicans as the people most discouraged from standing in the rain for hours are low-income voters. Whether this will be enough to swing those states is another matter though. They could be close. But turnout is crucial to determining who wins.
(Emphasis mine.) I was wondering if this was actually true this year...
Aren't we actually leading in all of the early voting? Every statistic that I have seen about early voters, for instance, 2 million early voters in Georgia, where the total amount of votes was something like 3.4 million in 2004, seems to be in our favor.
And I don't just mean that the turnout has increased so much, but also that in all of the reports that I have seen, Obama is getting more votes from the early voters than McCain.
Wouldn't it be best to actually hope for thunderstorms at this point? Of course I do not want to discourage anyone from voting, but I do not think that there is much chance of that at this site :-) Also I don't want to appear complacent, but it just seems to me that if the polls would close, say, now (or never open in the first place), we are looking at President-elect Obama.
However - I don't know what the early voting situation is with regard to, for instance, Proposition 8 in California. And there are of course many important races today. It just seems to me with regard to the presidential election in this year, a low turnout on election day itself can only help Obama, not harm him. What do you think?