More NC Polls and Data--Who's Right? And An Indiana Win for Hillary is No Upset

If you look at today's polls in NC, Obama is either cruising to a comfortable victory, or he's in danger of a close call. Public Policy Polling gives Obama a satisfactory 10 point lead, Zogby says he's up by seven points, but Insider Advantage says it's a statistical dead heat, with Obama's lead down to three points.

Who to believe?

We'll put our money on Public Policy Polling because of the impact of early voting in NC. Early voting ended Saturday with roughly 400,000 Carolinians taking advantage on the Democratic side. In the PPP sample, 29% of the voters polled had already voted. Of those, Obama won handily, 63%-34%. That's a huge lead going into the voting tomorrow (it transaltes to a lead of more than 100,000 votes).

The PPP early voting percentage in this poll is similar to reports from at least two other polls a couple days earlier, so it does not appear to be an anomaly.

To be sure, Obama barely leads--47-45%--amongst those who haven't yet voted, but unless turnout on election day far exceeds expectations, his large lead in the early vote tally should propel him to a comfortable victory.

Obama needs a solid victory in NC, because he's likely to come out behind in Indiana, a state that never favored him other than being next door to Illinois. The Clintonistas will try to spin a victory for Hillary in Indiana as some sort of upset, but it's not. Indeed, Hillary has held the lead in a majority of Indiana polls since the beginning of March--see here--so this isn't some new phenomenon.

[Indiana also has early voting, but it was for a shorter period and has not been nearly as robust as in NC. In a Survey USA poll out today, 3% of the sample had already voted, and they went for Hillary by a margin of 54-35%.]

That said, we'd still give Obama an outside shot at either winning Indiana, or coming within 2-3 points of Hillary there.

More On Obama's Lead In NC Early Voting

A couple of blogs have some good updated numbers on the massive "early vote" in North Carolina. CCPS Blog crunches the data and concludes that Obama is doing quite well in the early voting, with 40% of those voters being African-Americans. The question, of course, is whether those numbers will hold up on election day. We predict black turnout will be a bit smaller on Tuesday, but when combined with the early vote will be high by historic standards.

For a similar analysis, see dean4ever's post.

One question we have--for more analysis on another day--is whether the early voting phenomenon couldn't help Democrats in the general election, by giving them many days to run get out the vote drives, ferrying their people--especially African-Americans and senior citizens--to the polls over a period of a couple weeks.

We hope the Curmudgeon's NC kin are doing their part to add to the vote totals there.

Obama Takes Big Lead In NC Early Voting

Some polls suggest that the NC race may be tightening up a bit. On the other hand, it appears that the early voters in NC have gone heavily for Obama, so he may already have locked in a significant advantage.

According to the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies, which does some excellent number crunching, 144,000 North Carolinians had already voted on the Democratic side as of this past Tuesday. (The number came from the NC Board of Elections.)

While CCPS noted that the demographics of those early voters appeared to favor Obama, we now have further data to support that. A Survey USA poll released today includes the results from early voters--kind of an early exit poll. While the sample is quite small, Obama was leading 57%-39% amongst those who said they'd already voted.

A day or so earlier, Public Policy Polling also released a poll that included separate results for early voters. In that poll, 14% of respondents had already voted, so the sample is a bit larger. The results were even more dramatic: Obama 63% to Clinton's 31%.

If those numbers are accurate, Hillary starts in a pretty big hole on election day. We saw the inverse of this in Texas, where polls showed the race narrowing, but Hillary had a big lead in early voters. Ultimately, she won by a comfortable margin.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to outpace Hillary in new superdelegate commitments. Before the Pennsylvania primary, Obama's overall delegate lead got as high as 142. After Pennsylvania, Hillary closed the gap to about 130 delegates, but Obama's lead is now back up to 139 (we use the RealClearPolitics.com delegate count).

Yes, the Rev. Wright controversy has been a drag on Obama. But it doesn't appear to be enough to change the result for Democrats.