Is Obama Winning the Early Voting in Georgia?

Ben Smith has posted on his blog at Politico.com a short update about the incoming numbers of early voters in Georgia. There is a disproportionate number of Africans Americans who have cast early ballots in the Peach State. Though only 29 percent of registered voters in Georgia are Black, 37 percent of early voters in Georgia are Black. We still have three weeks before the election, and 75,000 more Georgians already have cast ballots than all early votes cast in Georgia in 2004. Data is available from the web site of the Georgia Election Division.

Let's make some wild-eyed guesses here. To date, 184,453 African Americans have cast ballots in early voting, and 315,129 other voters of all other races and ethnicities (White, Asian, Latino, Native American) have voted. Let's assume that 95% of African Americans have cast their votes for Obama, and five percent of African Americans have cast their votes for McCain. Let's further assume that 30 percent of Other Voters have cast their ballots for Obama, and 70 percent of Other Voters have cast their ballots for McCain. (I confess I am pulling these percentages out of the thin air, and I am ignoring Barr and McKinney.) Given these assumptions, these numbers would reflect the current vote totals for the two candidates:

Obama Voters
African American 175,230
Other 94,439
Total 269,768

McCain Voters
African American 9,223
Other 220,591
Total 229,814

In other words:

Obama 54%
McCain 46%

This is all just so many pixels on a computer screen, but it is intriguing to speculate what is happening in early voting in Georgia.