Gore to close for Obama in Florida. Well, his track record there is so good. In addition to losing the state for Obama, he’ll probably make it snow as he rails about global warming. I’m super serial. Perhaps this is the reason for Obama’s positively Kerry-esque numbers in Florida early voting:
Democrats are beaming that their party is outperforming the Republicans in early voting, releasing numbers Wednesday that show registrants of their party ahead 54 percent to 30 percent among the 1.4 million voters who have gone to the polls early. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll gave McCain a 49-45 lead over Democrat Barack Obama among Floridians who have already voted. And Republicans continued to show a traditional strength, leading 50 percent to the Democrats’ 30 percent in the 1.2 million absentee ballots already returned.
Kerry lost Florida by five percent after leading early voting by a decent margin. Other early voting shows similarly underwhelming results for the alleged flood of first-time voters and young voters Obama is supposed to draw:
But serious pollsters know that the electorate may have changed slightly since 2004, but that massive turnout will still reflect past performance. It will be the same, just much more of it. Consider what’s going on with early voters in swing state Nevada. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, a quarter of the state’s electorate had already voted by Sunday. But of those voters, just 20 percent were Hispanic, 14 percent were under 30, and 15 percent didn’t vote in the last three elections. Early voters this year look pretty much like what we’ve seen in Nevada before. If that’s the case, polls based on a huge shift in the electorate that show Obama with a doughty lead would come up a cropper.
