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What Oregon’s early primary turnout numbers reveal

Dante Chinni

Posted: 05.19.2008 / 10:11 AM PDT

The results from the Oregon primary will be known Tuesday night, but the votes have been coming in for about two weeks now. In America’s only all vote-by-mail state, Oregonians don’t need to line up at the polls. In fact, if they are sure of their selection, they can return a ballot immediately after receiving it – and some have done that.

The Oregon secretary of state has been seeing primary ballots come in since May 4. In a roller-coaster primary season, that could affect the results from the Pacific Northwest Tuesday.

Consider that more than 85,000 ballots were returned in Oregon before the results of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6 were known – that was the night Sen. Barack Obama gained serious momentum. Some 441,000 ballots had been returned before Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s crushing 41-point margin of victory in West Virginia last Tuesday. Those 441,000 ballots would equal about half of the total turnout in Oregon’s 2004 presidential primary.

Overall, turnout looks to be big in the Beaver State, according to ballot numbers through late last week. As of Thursday, Oregonians sent in more than 580,000 ballots for the Democratic and Republican primaries. In comparison, about 420,000 ballots were received in 2004 and 475,000 were returned in 2000 over the same period. Overall, voters have returned about 29 percent of ballots – compared with 23 percent in 2004 and 26 percent in 2000.

What can be discerned from analyzing the number of early voters? Generally, high turnout figures have favored Senator Obama during the primary season. Officials at the Oregon secretary of state’s office also indicate there has been an extremely large increase in new voter registrations - a phenomenon that has also tended to favor Obama thus far.

But it’s more of a mixed picture when looking through the lens of Patchwork Nation.

The community types with the heaviest turnout through last Wednesday are not typically Obama strongholds, based upon primary-season results so far. Voters in “Boom Towns,” places experiencing rapid growth, had returned 32 percent of their ballots. Those in “Service Worker Centers” had returned 32 percent of their ballots. And in “Tractor Country,” filled with farmlands, 31 percent of the electorate had sent in theirs.

But it’s worth noting that both “Tractor Country” and “Boom Town” counties are not big population centers in Oregon. And while “Service Worker Centers” have tilted toward Senator Clinton in recent primaries, as Patchwork Nation has noted, “Service Worker Centers” in Oregon are a bit different.

For instance, the Patchwork Nation community of Lincoln City, Ore., appears to be leaning toward Obama. So high turnout in places like Lincoln City could be a boon for him.

In areas where Obama is expected to do well, including Oregon’s populous “Monied ’Burbs” and “Campus and Careers” counties, a lower number of ballots have been returned. Through Wednesday only about 27 percent of the ballots that went out to the state’s two “Campus and Careers” counties were sent in. Meanwhile, the state’s two “Monied ’Burbs” counties had only returned 22 percent of their votes through Wednesday.

Those numbers may indicate how the results unfold Tuesday, but it’s still unclear how many of those ballots contain Democratic primary votes – the Republicans will have their votes tallied Tuesday, too. 

And just because people can vote early doesn’t mean they always do. 

Past elections in Oregon show that there’s often a late rush of ballots turned in on Election Day. In the past four primaries in the state, between 26 percent and 31 percent of the total vote has come in on that day. Obama will be hoping that the last-minute surge comes from affluent suburban counties and college towns.