Illinois Early Voting

Data from Lynn Sweeton via Kos

So far, 298,113 Illinois voters have cast ballots including 174,739 Democrats (58.6% of those who have voted so far) and 83,166 Republicans (27.9%). (Note: Illinois does not have party registration, so Democrats are defined as those who have voted in a Democratic primary and Republicans are defined as those who have voted in a Republican primary.)

After typing and typing and typing, I notice that the post below is silly. 58.6% > 41.4%. A low turnout Republican primary can't explain why more than half of the people who have already voted in the Illinois general are Democratic primary voters.

Of course no one knows what early voting means because it is so new. In fact, the meaning of early voting totals is rapidly changing since early voting is so new. But I can see why Democrats are pleased.



Primary voting is an imperfect proxy for party registration which is an imperfect proxy for partisan orientation (leaning independents vote as they lean about as much as declared party supporters).

If the Democratic primary was closer than the Republican primary, then there will be pro-Alexi bias in the calculation. Yep the Republican primary was a Kirk cake walk.
740,000 voted in the Rep primary and 900,000 in the Dem primary

So far it seems to me that the Republicans prefer stupid insults even when they have credible arguments.


Now how does that compare to partisan self identification ?

In a PPP poll (pdf warning) which is supposed to be of likely voters self identified democrats outnumber self identified republicans 40% 30% R 30% I. 4/3 is higher than the ratio of votes in the primary. All doesn't matter if independents go for Kirk, but the evidence, such as it is, suggests that using primary voting is tougher on Giannoulias than using partisan registration data or even partisan orientation among voters classed by PPP as likely voters.

Hmm uhm tends to look not so bad.