Early Voting, a stray thought
I just checked out a great site for election data, fivethirtyeight.com, based on how high it’s listed by Google and the number of comments, I suspect I’m one of the last people to hear about it. Oh well. Anyway, I mention this because I’ve been wondering about early and absentee voting. It seems to me, the longer a candidate leads during early voting periods the harder it is for his/her opponent to catch up. For example, if candidate O leads candidate M by 5 points in a given state during the early voting period I’d expect the early results to represent that spread, assuming early voters are representitive of all voters in that state (historically early voters have been both more partisan and older). Still, if a candidate benefits from early voting it means the lagging candidate needs to corral not only a winning number of votes on election day but by a large enough margin to make up for the number of days s/he was in deficit during the early voting period. While it’s true McCain is doing better amongst older voters, Obama seems to be leading in the enthusiasm race, further, my understanding is, Obama’s campaign has done a better job of organizaing “early voters”. In short, I suspect Obama’s support may be understated by the polls since he has been leading in most swing states for all of the early voting period. We’ll see.