Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot has been doing some early voting analysis. After 800,000+ early votes in Georgia (a record amount), 60% are white and 35% black. He does some fancy math to estimate the votes each candidate has and puts the Obama lead at 8,944 votes. But:
That amounts to a lead of 1.08 percent, in a sample that is more than one-third African-American. Once again, like yesterday’s calculations in North Carolina, Obama can ill afford for the voter pool to get much whiter. I have little doubt that excitement over the first African-American major party candidate will boost black turnout above the 25.4 percent level of 2004. But I don’t think it will stay close to 35.6 percent.
In other words, if Obama wants to win he needs to keep black votes at historic and probably unreachable levels.
That is comforting. I’m not sure how well it maps to states where Obama does better among whites.
What Geraghty doesn’t cover is another block of votes that will go 99% for Obama… illegal votes by dead, multiple jurisdiction voters, and illegal aliens.