Democrats romp in Iowa early ballot requests, lag in North Carolina

Iowa Democrats are fired up, ready to go Not good news for Iowa Republicans:

With absentee and early voting set to begin next week in Iowa, a battleground state in the presidential race, Democrats have a 6-1 edge in ballot requests so far, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Democrats requested roughly 100,000 ballots, compared with 16,073 ballots requested by Republicans, the newspaper said. Absentee voting and in-person early voting begins on Sept. 27.

"I see the early vote numbers, and I grimace a little bit," said Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party and the editor of a popular blog, told The Journal. "It feels like an Obama state'. The president has been more accessible to voters than [Mitt] Romney and [Paul] Ryan."

The latest numbers are 105,669 Democratic ballot requests, 18,542 Republican ones.

In North Carolina, however, the numbers look terrible for us:

NORTH CAROLINA reports as of Tuesday morning 66,664 ballot requests with the following party breakdown:

Party Reg   
Dem    27.9%
Rep    51.0%
None/Oth    21.1%

On the positive side, those 66,664 ballots account for just 1.5 percent of the 4.3 million votes cast in North Carolina in 2008. So this is super early. It's early in Iowa, too, but the early ballot requests already account for about 10 percent of the 1.5 million votes cast in the state last cycle.