EMAIL DETAILS

A Closer Look At Early Voting In Colorado
POLITICSOCT 21 2010, 4:12 PM ET3
Democrats are happy with early vote totals in general, but the news appears grim in Colorado, where Republicans have requested and returned more ballots than Democrats. However, a look behind the numbers show something slightly different.

There is no Republican surge/tsunami/wave/upwelling/flood what have you.

Democrats are "losing" statewide, but they're losing at a pace that is similar to the pace they were losing in 2008, when they won the state. Democrats say that their voter rolls have shrunk, generally, because they've tended to it well -- and 50,000 voters have moved out of state.

A few points: there are more Republicans on the permanent absentee list, so it doesn't surprise either Democrats or Republicans that the total number of ballots returned will favor Republicans. However, of voters deemed to be regular Democratic midterm voters are casting ballots at a slightly higher rate than Republican midterm voters.

And of all the ballots cast, Democrats make up a higher percentage of the electorate than they did in 2008 -- 36.8 percent to 36.5%. Democrats have tracked 15,000 votes from Denver over the past two days -- only 22% of them are Republican.

And Democrats say that independent voters are breaking for Sen. Michael Bennet by ten percentage points -- 55% to 45%, according to Dem polling. If this is correct, both Democrats and Republicans have requested about an equal number of ballots, given that 513,000 Democrats requested ballots, 558,000 Republicans did and 450,000 independents did.


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
P Consider the environment before printing this email.