Using raw numbers compiled by George Mason University Professor Michael McDonald, I generated some stats on early voting trends nationwide.
According to McDonald's numbers, a bit over 12.3 million voters have already cast these ballots. About 5 million of these votes were cast in six states that report early voting turnout by party. (The states are Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina.)
I added up the totals for each these states and here's what the turnout is looking like so far for early voting (in percentage terms):
- Democrats: 47.8% of early voters
- Republicans: 34.6% of early voters
- Other/No party: 17.6% of early voters
It's hard to know what to compare these numbers to, so I decided to look at the November, 2004 voter registration statistics for each state (in a couple of cases, I had to look at county-level data). Here's what I found:
- Democrats: 41.2% of 2004 registered voters
- Republicans: 35.1% of 2004 registered voters
- Other/No party: 23.7% of 2004 registered voters
Remember, these numbers are only for the six states I flagged above. And as much as I'd like to offer a thorough analaysis, I'm not enough of an expert on these numbers to get into too much detail. Nonetheless, it is clear that Democrats are overperforming their 2004 registration numbers -- and they're doing so by quite a lot.
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