A preview of the presidential election results?

SurveyUSAhas a lot of good habits as a pollster, and one of them is breaking out the results of early and absentee voting in states where such things are allowed. So far, SurveyUSA has conducted polling in five states where some form of early voting was underway. In each one, Barack Obama is doing profoundly better among early voters than among the state's electorate as a whole:

...    Poll    % Voted               Non-Early
State  Date    Early  Early Voters  Likely Voters
============= ====================================
NM     10/13   10%    Obama +23%    Obama +6%
OH     10/13   12%    Obama +18%    Obama +4%
GA     10/12   18%    Obama +6%     McCain +11%
IA     10/9    14%    Obama +34%    Obama +10%
NC     10/6     5%    Obama +34%    McCain +5%

We should caveat that these are not hard-and-fast numbers. Estimates of early voting results are subject to the same statistical vagaries as any other sort of subgroup analysis, such as response bias and small sample sizes.

Nevertheless, Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004...

Now certainly, early voters tend to be your stauncher partisans rather than your uncommitted voters -- just 1-2 percent of early voters in 2000 and 2004 reported that they would have voted differently if they'd waited until election day. So it's unlikely that John McCain is actually losing all that many persuadable voters to the early voter tallies.

What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers; the question is whether the Republicans will be able to do the same.

(The above from FiveThirtyEight.com, where there is more data and analysis)