President Obama will make a brief stop in his hometown of Chicago Thursday afternoon to do something no sitting president has ever done before: he'll vote early.
Most states allow some method of casting a ballot before Election Day, whether by opening polling locations days or weeks in advance, or by accepting mail-in absentee ballots before the election.
Early voting laws increase voter turnout, allowing voters who can't get to the polls on Election Day to participate. Campaigns also prefer to "lock-in" support, which insulates them against changes in public sentiment and late-campaign scandals, and allows them to reapportion finite resources to undecided voters and swing states.
Historically, voters who cast early ballots tend to lean Democratic, as working-class and lower-income voters--traditionally Democratic constituencies--often have the most trouble traveling to polling locations on Election Day.
The United States is one of the few democracies that votes on a single weekday, rather than on the weekend when fewer voters are working, or over the course of several days.
The Obama campaign is already seeing strong gains among early voters in crucial swing states.
A Time Magazine poll of Ohio found even support for both Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney among likely voters who plan to vote on Election Day.
But early voting has already begun in Ohio, and of those respondents who have already voted, 60 percent supported the president, pushing him to a 5-point lead statewide in that Time poll.
In 2008, nearly a third of Ohio voters cast a ballot early, and experts project that nationwide, about 40 percent of all ballots will be cast early this year.
Earlier this month, Democrats won an important victory in Ohio, when a Republican-sponsored measure that would have ended early voting in the days before Election Day was permanently struck down, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to overturn the ruling that initially invalidated it.
Thus far, more than 800,000 voters in Ohio have cast early ballots this month, equivalent to about 14 percent of the total vote in the state in 2008.
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