Very early on, before this campaign started in earnest, live or die, I publicly cast my lot with Gallup and Rasmussen. As a poll addict going back to 2000, these are the outlets that have always played it straight. It's got nothing to do with politics and everything to do with credibility and not wanting to kid myself. So when an outlet like Gallup tells me Romney is up seven-points, 52-45%, among those who have already voted, that's very big news.
Just as Gallup did with their bombshell survey
showing that 2012 is looking like a year where Republicans will enjoy a
record three-point turnout advantage over Democrats (a ten-point shift
from 2008), for whatever reason, they buried the lede with this latest
bombshell, as well. When you consider the fact that the CorruptMedia's
been talking for weeks about how Obama's crushing Romney in early
voting, you would think Gallup proving that Narrative a big fat phony
lie would be news. Instead, though, they bury this explosive news at the
bottom of a piece headlined: "In U.S., 15% of Registered Voters Have Already Cast Ballots".
Sounds like a nothing story, right?
Except waaaaay at the bottom we learn this:
Thus far, early voters do not seem to be swaying the election toward either candidate.
Romney currently leads Obama 52%
to 45% among voters who say they have already cast their ballots.
However, that is comparable to Romney's 51% to 46% lead among all likely
voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling. At the same time, the
race is tied at 49% among those who have not yet voted but still intend
to vote early, suggesting these voters could cause the race to tighten.
However, Romney leads 51% to 45% among the much larger group of voters
who plan to vote on Election Day, Nov. 6.
When Gallup says early voters don’t
seem to be swaying the election, presumably what they means is that
because Romney is ahead by five points nationally, an early voting
advantage of seven-points isn't going to "sway the election."
Romney's early voting lead in Gallup
may not jive with the CorruptMedia narrative, but it does with actual
early vote totals that have been released and show Romney's early vote
totals either beating Obama in swing states such as Colorado and Florida
or chipping away at the President's advantage in the others. For
example, here's what we know about Ohio's early voting numbers, thus far:
But here is what we do know:
220,000 fewer Democrats have voted early in Ohio compared with 2008. And
30,000 more Republicans have cast their ballots compared with four
years ago. That is a 250,000-vote net increase for a state Obama won by
260,000 votes in 2008.
Something else in this Gallup survey
also helps shed some light on what we're seeing in these sometimes
counter-intuitive state polls. As the headline states, Gallup is showing
that only 15% of the public has already voted. Moreover, they've broken
down early voting by region and show that in the Midwest only 13% of
voters have already voted. And yet, many polls in places like Ohio show a
much higher percentage of early voters, some as high as 30%, which you
can bet skews the data. In other words, those polls can't be correct.
Other than the fact that this is
Gallup, another reason to embrace this poll is due to its very large
sample size of 3,312 registered voters.
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