Democratic Sen. Mark Udall
Any early voting analysis must look at how a state's statistics compare to those of past cycles, and ask whether new dynamics and laws might affect that historical comparison. And the overall conclusion I am drawing from comparing this year to past cycles is that 2014 is an in-between year.
This may not sound dramatic, but this is an improvement for Democrats from the last midterm. In most states I'm not seeing the daunting enthusiasm gap of 2010, and Democratic voters are showing up in impressive numbers. But Republicans voters are as well, and as we would expect there is still a drop among Democratic-leaning groups compared to a presidential year like 2012.
In most battlegrounds races, this makes it hard to draw any firm conclusions about who is heading to victory this year. Take Florida, where the partisan breakdown among early voters is almost halfway between where it was in 2010 (a dismal year for state Democrats) and 2012 (when the Democratic ground game helped Obama over perform polls).
There are some encouraging signs for Democrats when we look at voters who are voting this year but did not in the past midterms. This is true even in a state like Colorado where Democrats did uncommonly well in 2010. Tuesday will tell us whether this is enough to blunt the GOP's widening lead in the final polls.
• Colorado: All eyes are on the Centennial State because 1,343,059 ballots have already been received. That's 73.5 percent of the total 2010 electorate! Republicans have dominated among the ballots so far returned. As of Monday morning, they had cast 40 percent of ballots compared to 32 percent for Democrats. And that is already a tightening from the lead of 9-10 points they enjoyed through the week.
Democrats have not been panicked about the GOP's edge because Colorado Republican voters are more likely to return their ballots earlier, while Democrats pick-up the rhythm later on. (Part of the reason is that voters over the age of 65 vote at a dramatically higher pace than young voters.) In fact, Democrats outvoted Republicans for the first time this year among ballots that were processed on Saturday, and the GOP's gap should continue narrowing as younger and Democratic voters vote in great numbers in the final days. The question is whether the gap narrows enough for Sen. Mark Udall to have a shot at proving polls wrong, just as fellow Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet did in 2010.
Four years ago, Bennet won by 1.7 points even though the overall electorate skewed Republican by 6.8 points. At the moment it seems likely that Democrats can move the electorate to at least look like 2010's given the demographics of voters who tend to cast their ballot in the final days, especially when you consider that the state now has same-day registration for the time and that provisional ballots, which tend to skew Democratic, have still to be processed. But Cory Gardner is expected to do better among Republican and independent voters this year than Ken Buck did four years ago, in which case Udall would need the overall gap to be more narrow than in 2010. This is the key question we will be watching for in Colorado.
There's one additional positive sign for Team Blue. Voters who did not vote in 2010 but did vote in 2014 are a less Republican group than the overall electorate. That's a more significant statistic in Colorado than it may be elsewhere since the Democratic ground game in this state that year was so celebrated.
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Head below the fold for a look at Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, and North Carolina.
• Florida: Democrats had been looking forward to flexing their turnout muscle on Sunday thanks to their "Souls to the Polls" operation, and flex they did.
Among the 96,142 votes cast in Florida on Sunday, Democrats outvoted Republicans 52-27 percent. That allowed them to cut the Republicans' overall early voting advantage to 3.3 points, down from 8 points a week ago and 13 points a week before that. While this overall breakdown is a strong performance for Democrats for a midterm year, it is also a significant improvement for Republicans since 2012. In 2010, the GOP enjoyed an edge of 12.7 points but the Obama campaign's unprecedented focus on mail-voting in 2012 helped Democrats take a lead of 3.8 points in 2012.
I have written in the past about the many reasons that it may be hard to compare Florida's early voting this year to that of past cycles, so all I can say is that this supports the idea that 2014 is an in-between year, and that it would make sense for either gubernatorial candidate to win with such turnout patterns.
• Georgia: In-person early voting ended with 934,485 Georgians having cast a ballot. 32.8 percent of them are black, which is comparable to what early voting statistics showed in 2012 (33 percent).
That alone is a good sign for Democrats, who were fearful of a significant drop in African-American turnout over 2012. They seem to have mobilized minority voters who typically skip midterms: Of early voters who didn't vote in 2010, just 51 percent where white and 37 percent were black. Of course, if the Senate and/or gubernatorial races go to runoffs, Democrats would have to produce such turnout numbers again in December and/or in January to be in contention.
• Iowa: Hawkeye State Democrats have historically been far more mobilized to vote early than Republicans. In 2010, a year that was hardly easy for them, they outvoted Republicans by 5.5 percentage points among early voters. This year, the Democratic advantage among early voters has been more modest. As of Monday morning, Democrats had cast 40.6 of 432,190 early votes, while Republicans had cast 38.8.
This is a product of Republicans raising their early voting game more than it is a product of Democrats' failing at theirs. Indeed, both GOP and Democratic turnout is already up significantly compared to 2010's total early vote. As such, it is possible the shift we are seeing is mostly due to registered Republicans shifting their preferred mode of voting. But it is also possible that Republicans are doing a better job than Democrats at expanding the voting universe.
Democrats have been saying that their internal tracking shows that many of the unaffiliated who voted early are Democratic-leaning voters who did not vote in 2010. Unfortunately, unlike other states Iowa releases few statistics about early voters beyond the overall partisan breakdown so it is not possible to assess that claim based on these official reports.
• Maine: On Wednesday, independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler invited his supporters to back another candidate if they thought he could not win. Independent Sen. Angus King soon switched his endorsement from Cutler to Democratic nominee Mike Michaud, I immediately wondered how many Maine voters had already locked in their vote before hearing of these developments and shifting their vote away from Cutler.
Here's the answer: As of Thursday morning, 84,617 Maine voters had cast their ballots, 24.4 percent of which are independent voters. That may sound like a lot, and in a close race it may well make a difference, but that number corresponds to just 14.6 percent of the total number of votes cast during the 2010 elections.
A little math: Supposing 15 percent of those voters went for Cutler, that two-thirds of them would have chosen to vote for someone else had they waited for his announcement, and that they would have chosen between Michaud or LePage in the proportion suggested in the most recent PPP survey (55 percent Michaud and 35 percent LePage), we are talking about a potential loss of about 0.3 percent for Michaud in the final margin.
• Nevada: For much of the two-week early voting period, Silver State Democrats seemed to have disappeared. The situation stabilized over the last two days of early voting (Thursday and Friday), when Democrats finally outvoted Republicans by meaningful margins in Clark County, the county home to Las Vegas and almost three-quarters of the state's residents.
This at least raised hopes that enough Democratic voters will show up on Tuesday to save the party from unexpected upsets, but it was not enough to make the overall turnout look anything like what Democrats want it to be. Two numbers capture the situation.
First, registered Democrats have been narrowly outvoted overall in Clark County, a dramatic reversal from the large leads that Democrats had amassed there over the past cycles. Second, only 23 percent of Clark County's active registered voters have cast a ballot for now. In many of the state's rural counties, where Republicans do well, more than 30 percent of active registered voters have voted.
Unlike what has happened in Iowa, the GOP's gains in Nevada come from a significant drop in turnout compared to the previous midterms. Some of this makes sense, as there is no high-profile competitive statewide race this year unlike Harry Reid's re-election campaign four years ago.
Nevada reporter Jon Ralston wrote on Sunday that the turnout gap is so favorable to Republicans that Democrats are risking heavy losses in races that were not supposed to be on our radar. We're talking about Rep. Steve Horsford, attorney general nominee Ross Miller, secretary of state nominee Kate Marshall, and many legislative and down-ballot candidates. These races now depend on the Democratic ground game—led in part by the Culinary Workers Union—succeeding in turning out enough voters to close the GOP's edge to a more manageable margin than the current gap of 7 percentage points.
• North Carolina: In-person early voting concluded on Saturday on a strong note: a total of 1,097,560 North Carolinians took advantage of one-stop voting, a 121 percent increase over 2010. And much of that growth came from Democrats and from African-Americans.
About 284,000 African-Americans voted early this year, an impressive 45 percent increase over 2010. White voters increased their participation in early voting by just 12.5 percent. Among Democrats, the growth from 2010 was 25 percent, compared to just 5 percent among Republicans. The biggest increase, however, comes from independent voters: 45 percent more voted this year. Who these voters are is obviously the big question heading into Election Night.
And as you would expect given the numbers above, the most Democratic areas of the state saw particularly strong turnout. Orange County (that's Chapel Hill) finished 43 percent above its 2010 number, and Durham County finished 34 percent above. Throw in North Carolina's relatively modest mail-voting as well, and here is where we stand: 1,155,124 North Carolinians have already voted, 47.6 percent of them Democrats and 31.9 percent of them Republicans. That's an edge of 15.7 percentage points. That compares very well to 2010 (46-37) and is only a drop of 0.4 percentage points compared to the presidential year of 2012.
Of course the big question is whether the growth in early voting is just a result of voters who would vote anyway just doing so early. We have numbers to indicate that this is not the case. Twenty-five percent of early voting Democrats did not vote at all in 2010, compared to 20 percent of Republican early voters. And whites made up just 66 percent of voters who didn't vote at all in 2010, compared to 72 percent among all early voters.
That said, while the early voting electorate is much less white than in 2010, it is also significantly more so than in 2012: 71 percent versus 67 percent. This highlights that Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan needs to win a significantly greater share of the white vote than Barack Obama did two years ago.
• Others: There are many other states to go through, but there is only so much time. You can check Michael McDonald's excellent site for the latest statistics from all the states, and tell us more in the comments about states I have missed.
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