That's right, he may not win on election day, but if the early votes that have already been cast were tabulated, my guess is that Obama would be winning the state. I base that prediction on the fact that thus far 38% of the 266,408 voters who have cast ballots are African Americans. Additionally, according to the Research 2000 poll recently commissioned by this website, Obama is winning among African Americans in the state by a margin of 91% to 5% with 4% undecided; Obama is winning among Hispanics in the State by a margin of 65% to 9% with 26% of Hispanics still undecided; Obama is winning among other demographic groups by a margin of 68% to 9% with 23% undecided; and McCain is winning among whites by a margin of 73% to 21%.
Now for the purposes of this analysis I am going to utilize the Research 2000 poll as a baseline, and I am also going to assume that in the early voting all of the undecided voters have broken for McCain. Additionally, for whatever reason I have not been able to find any information regarding the percentage of early votes that have been cast by Hispanic voters or voters who list their ethnicity as other. As such, for purposes of this analysis, I will assume that 4% of all Early voters are Hispanic and that 1% of all Early voters identify as "other." I make this assumption based upon exit polls from 2004 indicating that Hispanics made up 4% of all voters in the 2004 Presidential election and that people identifying as other make up about 1% of the population.
With all of these assumptions and caveats in mind, we can extrapolate that among the 100,095 African Americans who have cast early ballots thus far in Georgia, Obama has 91,086 votes and McCain has 9,009 votes. We can extrapolate that among the 10,536 Hispanic voters who have cast early ballots thus far, Obama has 6848 votes, and McCain has 3,688 votes. We can exptrapolate that among the 2,664 voters who have cast early votes and identify as "other" when asked about their race, Obama has 1811 votes, and 853 have voted for McCain. Finally among whites, 32,154 have voted for Obama, 114,834 have voted for McCain, and 6,125 have voted for other third party candidates.
When you tally it all up, the totals are as follows
Obama 131,899
McCain 128.384
Other 6,125
Keep in mind, in coming up with these numbers, I have given McCain the benefit of the doubt by assuming that all undecided voters have broken in favor of McCain. If you give Obama a reasonable share of the undecided voters, then this margin is probably somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 votes. If this trend continues throughout early voting, then McCain will have a sizeable deficit heading into election day. If the trend continues on election day, then Obama probably wins the state of Georgia!