Obama has inched up in the tracking polls for the third straight day, and he now leads by 6% according to Pollster.com with less than 77 hours before the polls close in all swing states. (Iowa is the last "swing state" to close, if you can call Iowa a swing state, anyway. Part of Montana closes at 11:00 p.m. eastern). So, McCain has to gain a full 1% on Obama every thirteen hours between now and then in order to win. That means that McCain has to flip about 100,000 voters every hour, or three every second, in order to tie Obama. Best of all, he can only target 70% of the electorate for these votes, because 30% is already spoken for.
According to Rasmussen and Gallup tracking polls, Obama is up by about 10% with nearly 30% of the vote already cast. Here is the relevant quote from today's Gallup poll, which Obama currently leads by 10%:
The trend in early voting has trended consistently upward on a day to day basis, moving from 7% of registered voters, who had already voted during the period of Oct. 17-19, to the current estimate of 27%. Another 8% of registered voters still indicate that they plan on voting before Election Day itself. The vote choices of these early voters -- all of whom are included in the likely voter pool since they are definite voters -- skew more toward Barack Obama than the sample average.
Nearly a third of voters say they have already cast their ballot and Obama leads by nine among this group. Obama also has a similar lead among the small group who have not voted but still plan to vote early. The candidates are essentially even among those who plan to vote on Tuesday.
Gallup and Rasmussen have by far the largest sample sizes, allowing for more useful crosstabs of early voters. The Gallup and Rasmussen crosstabs on early voters are larger than the entire GWU . Battleground and IBD / TIPP tracking polls, for example. Combined, Gallup and Rasmussen show that Obama is leading by 10% with 30% of the vote already cast.
This is fantastic, and extremely reassuring news. It means that McCain has to win the remaining 70% of the vote by more than 4% just to tie Obama. It means that lines at many strong Democratic precincts won't be as long on Election Day. It means that it is more difficult for these votes to be suppressed. It means that these voters can't forget to vote, or suddenly face an emergency that prevents them from voting. As I discussed yesterday, it means that Obama has already won the Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico victory firewall, and now only needs to hang onto Pennsylvania in order to win.
It also means, unfortunately, that exit polls might give us a scare on November 4th. It appears that exit polls do take early voting into account, but only in 18 states and do not include cell-phone only early voters. For both of these reasons, the exit polls might skew toward McCain a bit, and give a bunch of us some heart palpitations. That is a negative, but overall a very small negative compared to the overwhelming benefits of this early voting advantage.
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