October 26, 2010 10:14 PM UTC

Where is the wave? Here's the wave.

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• by: H-man

The Secretary of State’s office has made two releases of voting totals which indicate the party affiliation of those whose votes have been cast.  We learned yesterday that 443,611 votes were cast of which 184,982 were cast by Republicans and 159,882 were cast by Democrats.  

But what does that tell us about a wave?  ColoradoPols headline screams “Still no GOP ‘wave'”.  I thought it might be helpful to show them where they need to go to find it.

In the last general election, 2008, the final results for early voting in Colorado showed more Democrats early voting than Republicans.  The final numbers, according to Dem party’s Dan Slater were 659,278 Dems voted early, and 644,806 Republicans voted early.  That works out to 36.4834 % for the Dems to 35.6825 % for the Republicans, or +.8%, or 14,472 votes for the Dems.

The 2010 numbers so far show a very different turn out.  So far the Dem turnout is similar to their 2008 early voting coming in at 36.0410 %, down slightly by .4%.  The Republican turn out is way up (as in wave) coming in at 41.6991 %.  That number is 5.7% higher than the Dems in 2010 and an improvement from 2008 of 6.5%. That translates to a republican advantage of 25K votes so far.How this impacts races is pretty easy to see.  If Independents are pretty much a wash in a race, like the US Senate race seems to indicate, and the parties are tied using a 36% Republican vs. 35% Dem model like the News9/ Denver Post poll from this weekend, when the differential is over 5%, instead of 1%, Buck wins by three points.

The Dems ace in the hole has been to call in what they contend is a superior get out the vote strategy.  The OFA team of college kids has been in town to turn out the vote.  The Republicans don’t have anything like that, the Dems contend, so that if the race is close, they will win.  If that is true you would expect in those counties where the Dems need to pick up the slack and pile up the votes they would be shining.  The statewide average is 18.2%.  Here are those numbers.

Voted by 10-25 Active Registration % of turnout

Denver-D 23,306 137,202 17

Denver-R 8,367 46,553 18

Boulder -D 13,806 69,289 20

Boulder – R 7,354 34,297 21.4

Republicans in Denver and Boulder are voting in higher percentages than Dems in those counties.

How are the Republicans doing in the counties where they need to run up the vote?  Here are those numbers:

    Voted by 10-25 Active Registration % of turnout

El Paso – R 26,015 134,919 19.3

El Paso – D 11,828 64,192 18.4

Douglas – R 15,937 76,526 20.8

Douglas – D 6,742 33,333 20.2

Republicans in El Paso and Douglas counties are voting in higher percentages than Dems in those counties.

Picking up 6.5% in two years and outpolling the Dems by 5.7% is the wave that will carry a lot of Republicans to victory.  That wave will be about 100K votes high.