Have at it. BTW, the last time I looked at this was Mon. or Tues., so there may be some very minor changes.
Ohio is where Republicans are spinning the most, and unfortunately some reporters are buying it. Take CNN, which headlines "Republicans point to early vote gains in Ohio."Based on what McDonald is saying here, I'm not so sure there's much chance of OH not going to Obama basically by default. Esp. when you've got 1.1mil Ds who voted in their meaningless 2012 primary, compared to ~1.2mil Rs (with some probable turncoats) who voted in their vitally important 2012 primary that should've had more of the base fired up. And considering OH only tabulates "Party" by "last primary voted in", this implies there's likely scores of D voters unaccounted for.
The primary source for this story is the Romney campaign, which is promoting party registration statistics to back up their claims. Only at the bottom of the story, does CNN's Peter Hamby write that Ohio does not have party registration. "Party" in Ohio is a record of the last party primary an individual voted in. Worse, Peter Hamby reports this as a he-said-she-said story, noting that it is the Obama campaign who points out Ohio does not have party registration, something he could have easily discovered on his own.
…
As of Thursday's report, there are 124,967 Cuyahoga registered voters who most recently participated in a Republican primary, or 13 percent of all registered voters. There are 17,133 such persons who have voted, or 21 percent of all voters. So far the story is mostly true; perhaps it is based on an earlier Cuyahoga report.
But what about the voters who last participated in a Democratic primary? They are 343,392 of all registered voters, or 37 percent. 49,720 of these folks have voted, or 60 percent. Comparably, a larger percentage of "Democrats" have voted early in Cuyahoga than Republicans, compared to their base registration statistics.
…
Before we draw that conclusion, let's understand what is really going on here. 2.4 million Ohioans voted in the 2008 Democratic primary, compared to 0.5 million in the Republican primary. Over the course of four years, some of these people were purged from the voter rolls. In 2012, 1.1 million Ohioans voted in the Democratic primary, and 1.2 million voted in the Republican primary. I suspect that there were a good number of Democrats who crossed over and voted in the Republican primary just because it was the more interesting race from the presidential perspective. In Ohio, all of these folks are now labeled Republicans. "Party" is so hopelessly confounded in Ohio that it is next to meaningless to divine who is ahead.
The Cuyahoga numbers do reveal something about early voters. They are highly participatory people who tend to vote in primaries. There are 458,193, or 49 percent, Cuyahoga registered voters who have no record of voting in any primary. Only 15,835 have voted so far, or 19 percent. Let me put this another way, people who vote the earliest are people who just generally vote.