“We’re doing well right now, so early voting makes a difference,” Mitt Romney told supporters Monday in Avon Lake, Ohio, reminding the crowd that early votes count the same as those cast on Election Day. “It helps us. It’s, you know, a little extra boost when we need it, so thank you for doing it.”
When President Obama flew home to Chicago last week to cast his ballot, he became one of the millions of Americans who have already voted — a flood of early votes that is reshaping how both campaigns operate.
The every-day-is-Election-Day effects of early voting have transformed modern campaigning, from the Bruce Springsteen concerts the Obama campaign organized this month to mobilize supporters to the polls, to the less glamorous databases that the campaigns keep to track potential early voters as their get-out-the-vote operations have stretched into weeks instead of one frantic day.
Nearly 15 million people have voted so far, according to Michael P. McDonald, an associate professor of government and politics at George Mason University who keeps tabs on early voting. He said that the pace of early voting this year suggested that 35 percent or more of all votes could be cast before Election Day, surpassing the previous record in 2008, when 30 percent voted early. “Both registered Democrats and registered Republicans are voting at clips that are outpacing their 2008 levels,” he said.
Both parties have been spinning cherry-picked statistics to paint their early-vote operations as a success. While the true measure of their success will not be known until all the ballots are cast and counted, a look at who has voted early so far and where they live does give some meaningful indications of how the early vote is going in some of the swing states where the election will be decided.
Democrats appear to have an advantage with early voting in several of them. Iowa Democrats had cast nearly 59,000 more early votes than Iowa Republicans through the end of last week. A state law there allows campaigns to petition election officials to open temporary voting locations, which have popped up in Mexican restaurants, evangelical churches and libraries. When Mr. Obama visited Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, the day after his second debate, a voting site was set up just across campus, with giant chalk-drawn arrows on sidewalks to guide students to cast their ballots. That day 433 people voted, according to Tim Box, the deputy commissioner of elections in Linn County there.
More early votes have been recorded this year in Nevada than were four years ago, and more than 35,000 more early votes have been cast by Nevada Democrats than by Republicans, giving Democrats a 46 percent to 36 percent lead in ballots cast in person by early voters.
But in some states, there are indications that Republicans are narrowing their early vote deficits. In North Carolina, about half of the 1.5 million votes received so far were cast by Democrats, giving them an advantage of nearly 20 percentage points above Republicans. It is a wide margin, but the question is whether it will be wide enough: Mr. Obama won the early vote in North Carolina by an even wider margin four years ago, Professor McDonald noted.
And it was that wide margin that helped Mr. Obama win the state — the early vote propelled him to victory even though he received fewer votes than Senator John McCain on Election Day.
Republicans have an edge in early votes in Colorado, where they have cast nearly 20,000 more than Democrats. Since Republicans in many states are more likely to wait until Election Day, the party’s mission in many places is simply to whittle away at the Democratic advantage in early voting — so that Democrats will have a smaller cushion of votes going into Election Day.
Some Republicans argue that the Democrats are effectively cannibalizing their Election Day turnout, saying that many of their early voters appear to be frequent voters who would vote anyway. “Republicans have been focused on increasing turnout among those Romney supporters who are less likely to vote and banking those votes during the early vote period,” a blog post on the Republican National Committee’s Web site said.
Several states controlled by Republicans cut back early voting hours this year. After officials in Ohio announced plans to eliminate early voting in the days before the election, with an exception for members of the military, the Obama campaign sued. They prevailed in the case, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Republican officials in Florida scaled back their early voting hours this year, too, eliminating voting on the Sunday before Election Day, when many black churches conducted “souls to the polls” voting drives.
Some 1.9 million Floridians have already voted. More than half a million people there have gone to the polls since the state began in-person early voting over the weekend, and Democrats cast more than 78,000 more votes than Republicans, according to statistics provided by the state. The first weekend of in-person voting erased the 61,000 vote edge that Republicans had run up with absentee ballots, most of which were mailed in. But in Florida more than 300,000 early and absentee votes were cast by independent voters — whose votes could prove decisive.
In Ohio, party affiliation is difficult to gauge, because the state does not register voters by party; the only indication of party affiliation is which primary they last voted in. The state’s decision to send absentee ballot request forms to all voters this year for the first time led to an increase in requests from rural, traditionally Republican counties, said Professor McDonald, but also in urban counties. In Cuyahoga County, the Democratic stronghold around Cleveland, more early votes have been tallied so far this year than there were four years ago.
Bill Dorsey, 68, a retired teacher in Ohio, cast his ballot for Mr. Obama last week in Franklin County, on the north side of Columbus, in a former Kohl’s department store that closed last year. “If I drop dead before Election Day,” said Mr. Dorsey, “my vote still counts.”