Survey USA now reports the number of people who say they have "already voted" in many of its pre-election polls. This is an important tool to gauge how the presidential race is unfolding among those who have already cast their ballots.
Nate Silver looks at these results from five states (NC, GA, OH, NM and IA). It appears Obama's efforts to boost turnout through a strong ground game are paying off. The Survey USA polls show large double-digit leads for the Democratic nominee in four of the five states (NM +23, OH +18, IA +34 and NC +34). Obama holds his "smallest" lead among early voters in Georgia, +6.
A few important caveats are in order. First, these are poll results, not actual vote counts. So like with any survey, there are issues such as sampling problems and margin of error. Second, as Silver notes, early voters are staunch partisans, which means John McCain is probably not losing a big share of the "persuadable" universe. Very few of those who already voted would have changed their minds in the last three weeks of the campaign.
You might also ask if Democrats traditionally make up the biggest proportion of the early voting universe. Not so, writes Silver:
According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry
Here's the bottom line according to Silver:
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.
Good question….
