Historical comparison shows Democrat/Republican breakdown in early vote standard for midterm election; no enthusiasm gap yet

Sunday, Oct. 17, 2010 | 11:30 a.m.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have shown you that the Democrats are leading the GOP in early voting, but not by as much as registration totals in Clark. Below is an analysis of what happened last midterm, in addition to the Washoe County numbers from Saturday, indicating no enthusiasm gap yet.

Clark = 17,066 early votes

8062 Democrats (47% - 2.4% percent of total Dems)

6488 Republicans (38% - 2.7% percent of total GOP)

So Democrats underperforming Republicans by three-tenths of a percent.

Washoe = 4260 early votes

1733 Democrats (41% - 2% of Dems)

1964 Republicans (46% - 2.3% of GOP)

So in Washoe, same underperformance by Democrats.

So pretty much even after first day in terms of percentage of each universe.

Democrats performed yesterday as well as they did on the first day in 2006 (47.0 in '06 compared to 47.2 in '10) and the GOP performed worse yesterday than they did in '06 (39.2% in '06 compared to 38% in '10). So, GOP is actually performing worse as a share than they did in the last midterm for day 1 even though they outperformed registration. And their performance is not so far changing the composition of the electorate.

Remember, though, this is only 1 of 14 days of data.