Early Voting Trends Favor Obama

According to a new SurveyUSA poll, Sen. Barack Obama is performing considerably better among early voters than Sen. John McCain in several swing states.

Here are the results:

New Mexico

Overall Trend: Obama +6%

Electorate Voting Early: 10%

Trend among Early Voters: Obama +23%

Ohio

Overall Trend: Obama +4%

Electorate Voting Early: 12%

Trend among Early Voters: Obama +18%

Georgia

Overall Trend: McCain +11%

Electorate Voting Early: 18%

Trend among Early Voters: Obama +6%

Iowa

Overall Trend: Obama +10%

Electorate Voting Early: 14%

Trend among Early Voters: Obama +34%

North Carolina

Overall Trend: McCain +5%

Electorate Voting Early: 5%

Trend among Early Voters: Obama +34%

Not only are these positive results in general, but they wildly surpass typical Democratic performance in early voting.

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. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.

This is an enormous credit to the Obama Campaign, which has recently been leading a mass effort to encourage supporters to vote early. This week, for example, former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry has been stumping around Wisconsin to get Obama supporters - particularly college students - to vote early.

Their efforts appear to be paying off.

So how does early voting help the Obama campaign?

As www.fivethirtyeight.com points out:

Now certainly, early voters tend to be your stauncher partisans rather than your uncommitted voters -- just 1-2 percent of early voters in 2000 and 2004 reported that they would have voted differently if they'd waited until election day. So it's unlikely that John McCain is actually losing all that many persuadable voters to the early voter tallies.

The real advantage of having supporters vote early is that the campaign can focus more time and energy on supporters that vote less frequently (because they are less politically engaged) in the final 72 hours.

So have early voting laws made October a month long GOTV period? It would certainly appear so, as this tactic is sure to be used in presidential campaigns to come. The Obama campaign deserves a nod for their skills and foresight throughout this unusually long election cycle - but perhaps for this moment more than any other.