North Carolina Early Voting Statistics: Obama Likely Leads

As of this morning, an early voting project at George Mason University is reporting that 58 percent of North Carolina's total turnout in 2004 has already voted early in the presidential election. That is a 28% increase from the last election. Although the votes are not tallied until Election Day on Tuesday, statistics regarding party, age, race, and sex have all been released.

Polls have been consistently showing Senator Obama getting over 90% of the African American vote, with Senator McCain getting less than 5%. Therefore, North Carolina's report of 26.6% African American early voters can be safely estimated at about 24% for Obama. That leaves him needing 27% more votes coming from white voters and those with race listed as other.

Could Obama have gotten 27% of the 69.3% of white voters so far in North Carolina? Obama has been tracking at 44% among white voters in polls. If this number is holding for the early voting in North Carolina, that would leave him with about 30% of the 69.3% total white voters and at least 54% of early voters. There's no way of knowing for sure yet, but the numbers about party identification suggest that he currently has the lead.

North Carolina is also reporting early voter stats of 52.6% Democrat, 29.6% Republican, and 17.8% with neither party. Recent polls show McCain getting 89% of the Republican vote and Obama getting 83% among Democrats. Those numbers would leave Obama with 46.8% of the total vote, not counting Independents or Republicans. Therefore, he would need only about 4% of the 17.8% of those listed with neither party to have the 51% necessary.

The basis of this analysis is that Obama has so consistently received over 90% of the African American vote that, as long as turnout is high among African Americans, we can use a fairly solid estimate of where this group of voters stand to make a judgment of the state of the early voting race.

I am not in any way predicting that Obama will win North Carolina. I am just crunching the numbers so far and pointing out that Obama's extremely solid support among African Americans can allow us to analyze the early voting numbers with 4 days left to go.