Blogger Ali's take on OH Numbers

The Oct. 11 NBC/WSJ/Marist Ohio poll had Mitt Romney winning independents 49 to 41, an 8-point advantage. For the sake of this analysis, assume that the 47 percent of early voters who did not vote in a partisan primary are ‘independent’. While a new Marist poll was released just hours ago, it is important to remember that the Oct. 11 poll is when a majority of early ballots were being cast.

That puts early voting looking something like this: President Barack Obama 627,510 votes (48%), Mitt Romney 598,390 (46%) votes, with 54,990 (4%) votes undetermined.

Assuming the worst for Romney – i.e., independents break evenly and Party ID holds up — there is a 6-point early-vote gap. But if Romney has an 8-point advantage (per the NBC/WSJ/Marist poll) among independents, there is a 2-point gap.

More at the site, but Ali concludes that given traditional early vote leads in the Kasich election and in 2008, Zero isn't close to where he has to be.

But I would argue that the scenario is in fact better for us:

EVERYONE who runs these numbers assumes an even split of Ds voting for Obama and Rs voting for Romney. But as SoftwareEngineer has noted many times, if you only know one Democrat who has changed (and all of us do) that's a massive shift in numbers. So far---with one outlier---most polls show Rs going for Romney in the 89-92 range, and Ds going for Obama in the 87 range. That is significant.

The second factor is that Ohio is, for Republicans, an "election day turnout day." Yes, we are performing much better in early voting, but by all reports from walkers, these are NOT the "election day" Republicans---the base---but the so called "low propensity voters." In other words, it's entirely possible that R turnout in 2012 will significantly exceed 08 and more than likely look like 2010 (or the Gallup +R model, at least).

All of that leads me to stand by my prediction of 4% Romney win in OH.

PS. A high level GOP guy who has been here forever said on Twitter yesterday that Romney wins, period. This echoes what a GOP national insider told Hugh Hewitt yesterday---that Romney in fact already has a lead in early voting. (This would confirm my estimates and suggest that Ali's are low for the reasons I stated). Guess we'll see.

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