The Obama campaign also said that with the exception of Colorado, Democrats are doing better this year versus 2008 in every battleground state that allows voting by mail.
“At this point in 2008, Republicans had an absentee ballot request advantage of 259,000 ballot requests in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina and Nevada. In 2012, Democrats have cut that margin by 75 percent to just 64,000,” Jeremy Bird, the Obama campaign’s national field director, said in a memo Thursday.
Mr. Bird said new voter registrations since Aug. 1 have overwhelmingly come in demographics favorable to Democrats, including women, voters under 30 and minorities.
In Pennsylvania, for example, 67 percent of new registrants were under age 30, and another 22 percent were women or minorities over that age.
And in Florida, Hispanics have accounted for all of the growth in voter registration.
In Iowa, where early voting has been going on already, twice as many registered Democrats have cast ballots as Republicans. And that pace is well ahead of where Democrats were in the 2008 election at this point, the campaign said.
Democrats are also outperforming their 2008 vote-by-mail requests in Nevada, Florida and North Carolina.
Talking with reporters Thursday afternoon, Jim Messina, manager of the Obama campaign, said they have a number of different paths to win the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the White House, and said thanks to last month’s huge fundraising number — the campaign raised $181 million in September, its best month in 2012 — they don’t have to withdraw from any of the states where they are contesting the election right now.
“We have the ability financially to compete wherever we want to compete, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he said.