WASHINGTON — For at least 16 million voters, the 2008 election is already over.
Across the more than 30 states that allow no-excuse absentee or early voting, votes have been pouring in at a record pace, and the data show Barack Obama as the clear beneficiary.
In the Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll, 59 percent of those who said they already voted backed Obama and 40 percent indicated they had supported John McCain. So far, the numbers are a near mirror-image of the last two elections.
Four years ago, George W. Bush scored 60 percent of early voters, according to data from the National Annenberg Election Study. In 2000, that survey put the Bush’s take at 62 percent.
Mike DuHaime, political director for the McCain campaign, suggested that as the early vote numbers continue to come in, they will begin to reflect the traditional GOP advantage among those casting absentee ballots, and he thinks high early voting may simply take away from Election Day turnout among Democrats. “Programmatically, I feel pretty good about those numbers,” he said.
The numbers themselves are staggering.
Michael McDonald, an associate professor at George Mason University who compiles early voting statistics, said his running total of early voters now tops 16.4 million. “Looking at them, they’re defying all the trends we’ve seen in early voting,” he said.
McDonald and others estimate that as many as a third of all voters may cast a ballot before Nov. 4, about double the proportion who did so in 2000. Four years ago, approximately one in five voters voted before Election Day.
This year, both parties have put outsized emphasis on getting voters to commit early, and election administrators have encouraged the notion in hopes of easing their work at the polls on Tuesday.
Nationally, in the Post-ABC tracking poll, African-Americans make up 12 percent of all those who have cast ballots, significantly higher than the proportions from 2004 (8 percent) and 2000 (2 percent), according to the Annenberg studies.
Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore., said that “typically early voters have been older, whiter, higher income, better educated. This year they’ve been younger, African-American and more Democratic.”
“It’s hard,” he said, “to spin these numbers in any way that looks favorable to the GOP.”
