69-30

ABC News has a telling poll out today with some pretty stark numbers with regards to early voting:

For nearly one in 10 likely voters, it’s not a week from Election Day, it’s four years and a week. Their work in 2008 is done.

Those are the 9 percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll who say they’ve already voted, either by early in-person voting or absentee ballot. Their preference: Barack Obama over John McCain, by 60-39 percent.

That leaves 91 percent yet to vote, but more are coming. A total of 34 percent of likely voters intend to vote early, including those who’ve already done so and those who say they will in the next week. This overall early voting group favors Obama over McCain by 59-39 percent, essentially the same as it is among those who’ve gotten it done already.

So all of those early voting numbers we are seeing out of states like Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada and elsewhere really are showing a decisive advantage for Barack Obama and probably other Democrats as well. However, the data gets even worse for John McCain:

It’s even more lopsided in the 16 battleground and eight toss-up states, as identified by our Political Unit. In the battlegrounds, those who say they’ve already voted report a 69-30 percent preference for Obama over McCain; it’s about the same, 66-32 percent, when we add in those who intend to vote in the next week.

In the eight toss-ups (Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia) these preferences are 74-25 percent (already voted) and 69-29 percent (including those who plan to do so). (Note, given our sample size there’s a 10-point error margin on this estimate.)

These are the key swing states, and the numbers are even brighter for the Democrats than in the nation at large. Those are beyond landslide numbers. And lest we think that the early voting numbers were favorable for John Kerry in 2004, this was not the case:

Preferences are far more lopsided than in the 2004 ABC/Post tracking poll: Fifteen percent reported voting early, splitting 52-46 percent in favor of George W. Bush over John Kerry (and at this stage, a week out, 4 percent said they’d already done so). Obama’s mounted a major early-voting effort this year, and it looks to be bearing fruit. (Actual early voting in 2004 was 22 percent, higher than the poll estimate.)

We may all have an early night next Tuesday, folks.