From Rich Coolidge at the Colorado Secretary of State’s office an update from last week–numbers through Monday, October 25:
Democrats: 159882 (36.0%)
Republicans: 184982 (41.7%)
UAF: 95926 (21.6%)
Total: 443611
All voter registration/status as of 10/01/10:
Dem “active”–19.99% (159882/799981)
Dem registered–14.90% (159882/1073165)
Repub “active”–21.45% (184982/862575)
Repub registered–17.14% (184982/1079411)
UAF “active”–12.66% (95926/757935)
UAF registered–8.68% (95926/1105522)
Republicans are outpacing Democrats by 25,000 votes and nearly doubling the number of unaffiliateds. Republicans have a partisan lead over Democrats in key battleground counties like Arapahoe, Jefferson, and Larimer counties.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog sees early returns consistent with enthusiasm gap noted in the polls–and Colorado is in +R territory by at least 4 points.
This year, on average, the early vote has favored Democrats in these states by an average of 2 points. But in 2008, it favored them by an average of about 17 points — making for a 15-point swing against them.
If there were a 15-point swing toward Republicans in the partisan composition of the electorate, coupled with poor performance for most Democratic candidates among independent voters, that basically looks a lot like the Gallup “lower turnout” model, which could imply Democratic losses in the House in excess of 70 or even 80 seats — and which certainly implies the presence of a very large enthusiasm gap.