First off, what do the polls say? Four years ago, the RCP polling average had McCain winning the state in the final round of polling by 0.4 percent. Final polls from Fox/Rasmussen, Zogby and SUSA had John McCain winning by a point. The final Mason-Dixon poll had McCain winning by three, 49-46.

PPP had it Obama +1, as did ARG which is ironic because they suck overall. InsiderAdvantage had it tied. But bottom line, most polling had McCain slightly ahead. Obama ended up winning the state by 0.3 points, or about one point better than the polling composite.

Well, Mitt Romney currently has a bigger lead in North Carolina than McCain did—a 2.2-point edge in the TPM composite. Lots of that polling is pretty junky—Ras, the NC GOP, Gravis. On the other hand, Grove Insight (who polls for Democrats) had it Obama 47, Romney 44, while PPP had Romney up 49-47. More telling, the Obama campaign hasn't disputed Romney claims that the Republican is in the lead, which suggests that yes, Romney has the advantage.

Interestingly, it was Obama who increased his ad spending in the state last week:



Click on the link above to get the week-by-week totals for the state, but last week, the Obama campaign upped its spending slightly to $959,197. Meanwhile, Romney cut his spending from $1.4 million the week before, to just over $517,000. Meanwhile, Karl Rove's American Crossroads cut their spending from $1.7 million two weeks ago to $932,000 last week.

In other words, Obama can afford to spend what he's been spending, while Romney is triaging and shifting resources to other states. He knows that if he loses North Carolina, he's lost the race. But if he wins North Carolina, it doesn't mean he's won the White House. He needs a broader playing field.

Of course, I'm more convinced than ever that ad spending does little at the presidential level. So maybe it'll be significant, but maybe not. What is significant are the votes actually being cast. On that front, MattTX is doing fantastic work crunching the numbers. Here are his write-ups of day 1, day 2, day 3 and day 4 of early voting.

Note, we don't know how people have actually voted. What we do know is the party ID, race demo and location of those voters, and from that we can extrapolate some educated guesses. MattTX has made some assumptions that aren't unreasonable, such as only 28 percent of unaffiliated white voters will vote for Obama, etc.

As of Sunday, Obama had 55.3 percent of the vote based on these educated guesses, compared to 57.7 percent in 2008. That is, Republican-leaning demographics are outperforming their early vote totals from four years ago. However, far more people have voted this year than last cycle, an increase of 38 percent, so while the percentage margin may be narrower, the overall Obama advantage in actual ballots is just slightly off—in 2008, Obama led by 54,584 votes at this point, while this year he currently leads by 52,355—a difference of 2,229.

But here's where things get interesting—like I mentioned, the GOP is pushing early voting in a way that they didn't in 2008. So are they merely pushing election-day voters (where the GOP had a big advantage in 2008) to vote early? MattTX has an interesting observation:



Obama is indeed turning out new voters, whereas Romney is turning out the same old voters. In total, 324,780 people voted in One-Stop Early Voting on Thursday and Friday. Of those, 42,709 were brand new previously unregistered voters. They did not pass any poll's "likely voter" screen, nor did they even pass any poll's registered voter screen. And yet, they voted. And it is clear that they voted overwhelmingly for Obama (probably by about 2 to 1). Here's who those 42,709 brand new voters are: Party Registration: Democrats - 20,792 (48.7%)

Republicans - 8,699 (20.4%)

Libertarians - 604 (1.4%)

Unaffiliated - 12,614 (29.5%) Race: White - 19,041 (44.6%)

Black - 13,470 (31.5%)

American Indian - 510 (1.2%)

Hispanic - 2,706 (6.3%)

Other - 9,688 (22.7%) Gender: Male - 19,077 (47.0%)

Female - 20,055 (53.0%) Total - 42,709 (100%) Now why is this significant, you ask? Because it means that Obama is adding to his final vote total in early voting, whereas Romney is just moving some of his votes from Election Day to now, without actually increasing the total number of votes he will receive by nearly as much as Obama. That's the difference between finding $5 lying on the street, and moving $5 from your left pocket to your right pocket. Only the first transaction actually makes you richer.

If there were 42,000 of them and Obama won them 2-1, then he would have netted 14,000 votes from that group. In 2008, total turnout was about 4.35 million, so 14,000 would be about 0.3% of total turnout. So those voters alone would allow Obama to outperform the polls - none of which are capturing these voters - by 0.3%. That ain't nothing, in a close state!

Chachy in the comments did some additional math It seems clear that Romney has an edge in North Carolina polling, but that appears to be (at least partly) offset by a ferocious Obama GOTV operation. The GOP hasn't been sitting still, however, and they're also vastly over-performing their 2008 numbers.

And this brings up one last point—the GOP wishes fervently to pull stakes and move into Ohio or even Pennsylvania for a last-ditch effort to win the midwestern battlegrounds. As long as Obama keeps turning out these kinds of numbers, Romney's campaign won't be able to do so. As long as Democrats keep leading the early vote by these margins, the GOP is stuck spending time and resources defending a state that quite simply isn't important to Obama's electoral map.

It's a win-win for Team Blue—either we win North Carolina outright and Romney has no path to victory, or we lose it strategically—forcing Team Red to expend time, energy and resources.

GOTV makes a real difference, so sign up to help get Democratic voters to the polls in swing states with Workers' Voice, the largest independent Democratic voter turnout operation in the country. You can participate no matter where you live.

Update: dean4ever has a correction in the comments:

