Following up on a couple items from my previous diary, at our last data point Florida absentee and early voting showed that Dem and GOP ballots were running about even. Now, according to this must-bookmark early voting site, the Democrats have opened up about a 5 point advantage in ballots cast. Unfortunately we don't have more information to tell whether these are expected voters or new/infrequent voters, but at least it shows momentum. Also today, due to the extreme long lines at Florida early voting locations Governor Crist issued an executive order to have early voting locations open for 12 hrs each day instead of just 8.
The other news comes from the New York Times "The Caucus" blog, with some comments on early voting by McCain political director Mike Duhaime that seem disingenuous at best, and easy to refute. Here's what he had to say:
As the McCain campaign plane flew Tuesday from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, Senator John McCain's political director told reporters that he was encouraged by some of the early voting trends.
"There's no doubt that a lot of Democrats have voted early, but as you look deeper in the numbers a vast, vast majority of Democrats that are voting are presidential-year voters: they vote in every single presidential election,'' the McCain campaign's political director, Mike Duhaime, told reporters in the back of the plane.
"There are some new voters certainly voting, but those voters are on both sides,'' he said. "In a state like Nevada, you have fewer new people voting than in 2004. A place like Iowa you have fewer young people voting than in 2004. The big thing that I look at is whether the composite of the electorate is changing, and I have not seen evidence of that. There have been a few data points that suggest it, but I haven't seen full evidence of that yet.''
Fortunately for us he used Iowa and Nevada as examples where we have enough data to see for ourselves whether or not he's telling the truth. See my earlier diary here for full explanation. One part of his statement is correct, that a majority of the Democratic early voters in Iowa and Nevada are the usual voters. As you can see from the early voting data table only about 1/3 of the Nevada early Democrats and about 1/4 of the Iowa early Democrats are new/infrequent voters. But there are significant numbers of new/infrequent voters early voting. And of the early voters in both Iowa and Nevada, as you can see, the raw number of Democratic early voters outnumbers the raw number of GOP early voters, the percentage of Democratic early voters that are new/infrequent is greater than the percentage of GOP early voters that are new/infrequent, and the raw number of new/infrequent voters for the Democrats is greater than for the GOP. Actually, the difference between the raw number of new/infrequent Dem early voters vs. GOP early voters in Iowa is more than enough to make up the Bush margin in 2004 in Iowa and just about enough to make up the Bush 2004 margin in Nevada, two states that Bush won by close margins. The obama early voting operation in Iowa and Nevada is producing the advantage they set out to in these two states and if Duhaime says he's not worried about that he's either lying or a gift from God.
So far we only have three states with this level of detail on early voting, and Duhaime decided to quote two of these states when making his case to the New York Times, which makes it easier to refute. If he had picked any other states we may have suspected he was exaggerating his campaign's strength but we wouldn't have been able to refute it so easily.
