{"id":3108,"date":"2008-11-02T11:33:07","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T11:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/02\/early-voting-by-the-numbers\/"},"modified":"2008-11-02T11:33:07","modified_gmt":"2008-11-02T11:33:07","slug":"early-voting-by-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/02\/early-voting-by-the-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Voting, By the Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the election nearly upon us, I’ve started regularly following Talking Points Memo<\/a> again. Late last night, Josh Marshall wrote about the early voting results<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Among those who’ve already voted, it’s Obama 57%, McCain 38%. And that number is not inconsistent with numbers coming out of a lot of the early voting states.<\/p>\n

CBS says that “about one in five voters” have voted early. I’m sure I’m just missing it, but I can’t find it in the polling document. Meanwhile, Gallup says<\/a> the number is now 27%, which I find astonishing.<\/p>\n

Now, there are two ways of looking at these numbers. One possibility is that the big advantage Democrats are having among early voters is just a matter of regular Dems being so hyped up to get out to vote for Obama that they’re disproportionately going early. That, or some variant of that argument, is the one being advanced by the McCain campaign. On the other hand, perhaps this is the actual 2008 electorate showing up at the polls and showing a big swing toward the Democrats. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Using these numbers, we can be a good deal more quantitative than this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

If you accept the polling numbers as accurate (a big if, but par for the course with this sort of thing), what would McCain need to do on election day to make up this deficit?<\/p>\n

Well, if Obama has 57% of the early vote, then he’s already locked up 11.4% of the total vote (57% of the 20% who have already voted) according to CBS, or 15.4% according to Gallup. McCain, on the other hand, has either 7.5% or 10.3%.<\/p>\n

To get to a bare majority of 50.1%, McCain needs to get another 42.5% (or 39.8%), out of the remaining 80% (or 73%) of the voters. That means he needs to get 53.1% (or 54.5%) of the vote on election day (0.425\/0.8 = 0.531). That’s roughly the margin the elder George Bush had over Michael Dukakis, if you’d like a meaningless historical comparison.<\/p>\n

Put another way, if we assumed that the real distribution was 50.1% to 49.9% in McCain’s favor, then 22.8% (or 30.9%) of Obama’s supporters have already voted, compared to only 15.2% (20.6%) of McCain’s. This would require Obama supporters to be 1.5 times as likely to vote early as McCain supporters.<\/p>\n

So, what does it all mean? Hell if I know. You could argue that a 50% increase in early-voting likelihood is reasonable given the hype about the Obama “ground game.” You could probably make an equally plausible argument that it’s way too high.<\/p>\n

There’s really no way to say for sure, until Tuesday night. But if you like numbers with your gun-jumping political commentary, there are some numbers for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the election nearly upon us, I’ve started regularly following Talking Points Memo again. Late last night, Josh Marshall wrote about the early voting results: Among those who’ve already voted, it’s Obama 57%, McCain 38%. And that number is not inconsistent with numbers coming out of a lot of the early voting states. CBS says… Continue reading Early Voting, By the Numbers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}