4Chan, Reddit and large rallies are good at building group solidarity and raising money as well as a mob. So far they are not a substitute for a boring, grind it out ground game.
North Carolina has some interesting data on early voting:
Registered Democrats continue to lead in the accepted ballots numbers, and are over-performing their 2012 same-day comparison numbers, at 129 percent of where they were in accepted ballots on the same day from four years ago. Registered unaffiliated voters are 128 percent of their same-day accepted ballots, and registered Republicans are 66 percent of where they were four years ago on the same day. Overall, the total returned and accepted mail-in ballots are at 96 percent of where they were on the same day in 2012.
Registered Democrats are running about 30% higher than they did in 2012. Registered Republicans are running about 30% lower. If we were seeing equivalent ground games, the Republicans are missing one vote for every vote that has been returned.
Time to keep on grinding away as a superior GOTV organization is worth a point or two in. And if you are in a non-swingable state, work down ballot as this data suggests that the downballot Republicans in North Carolina are not hitting their early voting marks either.
Update 1: A very good friend of the blog argued via e-mail that the independent/non-affiliated surge is very likely to be embarrassed Republicans and thus there is not a Democratic advantage. I can see that to some degree. However if we assume that every vote above last cycle’s non-affiliated vote is effectively an embarrassed Republican vote the combined Republican vote would be about 3% more than the current Democratic registered vote or in horse race turns the Republican adjust lead is 51% to 48% for the adjusted two party vote. In 2012 backing out the incremental embarrassed Republican vote, the Republicans had 58% to 42% two party vote edge.