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Initial ballot returns posted by the Oregon secretary of state's elections division show that Democrats are turning their ballots in at a much faster clip than Republicans.
After two days, only 66,143 ballots have been turned in. That's not many, considering that there are 2.76 million registered voters in Oregon.
But of the ballots that have been turned in, 50.4 percent of them came from registered Democrats. That's a much bigger slice of the electorate than Democrats represent. They are Oregon's biggest party but comprise just 35.6 percent of registered voters.
Republicans, on the other hand, account for 28 percent of the ballots returned so far. That's a bigger slice of the electorate than they represent—they are 25.7 percent of voters—but not as big an overage as Democrats.
What that all means is that non-affiliated and minor party voters are slow to turn in their ballots.
The larger issue is this: Republicans in Oregon almost always turn out at a greater rate than Democrats for general elections (2008, when former President Barack Obama was on the ballot for the first time was an exception). In what pundits and pollsters are calling a toss-up governor's race, state Rep. Knute Buehler (R-Bend), the GOP nominee needs the Republican base to turn out far more enthusiastically than they have so far.
