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On Nov. 5, if the election turns out theway almost every forecast suggests that it will with Republicans taking the Senate, Democrats will likely blame the failure of their voters -- young people, African Americans and Latinos -- to turn out. And given that many states with tough Senate races are in the South, where the majority of African Americans live, Democrats are very much banking on black voters to be their firewall.

A story from The New York Times blares"Black Vote Seen as Last Hope for Democrats to Hold the Senate."

And in the USA Today, "Black lawmakers anchor Democratic Southern Voter Push."

President Obama, who spurred black voter turnout to record numbers in 2008 and 2012, is making his own appeal to black voters -- an effort backed by a $1 million push on black radio in North Carolina and more in other states from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. (Of course,given the tens of millions the DSCC spends, thisis a significant -- though not huge -- investment.)

Here was Obama on the Steve Harvey show on Wednesday morning (emphasis mine):

The truth of the matter is, African American voters, young voters, progressive voters, Latino voters, they now vote at relatively high rates during presidential elections. But I bet a whole bunch of your listeners arent even thinking about this election coming up on Nov. 4. But this is really the last election in which I have the opportunity to get a Congress that will work with me.

Back in 2010, folks didnt vote. As a consequence, the tea party took over the Republican Party. We lost the House. And, although weve made a lot of progress on various issues since then, basically Congress has fought me every step of the way and it led to things like the shutdown and all kinds of negative consequences in terms of things like gun control that we couldn't get done. So, we really need to have the kind of Congress that is serious about the issues that matter to folks and the responsibility is ultimately up on everybodys whos listening.

Folks like to complain, talk about Washington. But if only 45 ... 40 percent of the people are voting, then its not surprising that Congress isnt responsive. If people voted at the same rates during midterms as they did during presidential elections, we would maintain Democratic control of the Senate . . . and so I need everybody listening to understand this is really, really important.

Harvey's audience is primarily black, spread across 64 markets and numbers 7 million listeners.

Obama said "folks didn't vote," and as a result he was handed a shellacking in 2010, courtesy of the tea party and the failure of his folks to show up at presidential rates. Keep in mind, though, that turnout drops across the board in midterms,often from around 60 percent to somewhere in the 40s, depending on the demographic.

More:
The Fix: President Obama was wrong. Democrats wont lose because of black voters.

Two weeks ago, we looked at initial early voting data compiled by the U.S. Election Project with the aim of sussing out how campaigns were doing at putting votes in the bank. At that point, it seemed like Democrats were doing particularly well in Iowa and North Carolina compared to voter registration numbers. Republicans were doing well in other battleground states.

Now, that's changed. Compared to overall voter registration, Iowa and North Carolina Democrats are doing much worse than earlier in the month, and Republicans in those states much better. We've also added new states that recently began early voting: Nevada, California and Colorado. In each, Republicans are outperforming Democrats.

How to read this: A red or blue dot above the diagonal line shows that the Republican (or, for a blue dot, Democratic) vote in the state comprises a larger percentage of the early vote than the total voter pool. A dot below the line indicates that the early vote is under-performing for that demographic. The further above or below the line the dot falls, the better or worse the group is faring. The change since the last time we did this is indicated with a line connected to the small dot at the previous percentage.

Interestingly, unaffiliated/undeclared voters are uniformly underperforming their registration numbers, perhaps in part because campaigns aren't targeting them as aggressively in the early vote process. But that puts the poor performance of Democratic campaigns in sharper relief. If unaffiliated voters are underperforming as a percentage of all of the votes that are in, one would expect the two parties to be overperforming.

But Democrats aren't. The bad news for them is clear: the extent to which the red dots are above the line and the blue dots are below it. In what we expect to be a relatively low-turnout election, Democrats would want (and really need) to leverage their generally superior turnout mechanisms to bank votes early. So far, they're getting beaten at that effort.

The bad news for Republicans is that as we mentioned two weeks ago these numbers can and will change quickly. As always, it's the trend that's worth watching, and while the red dots are mostly rising, they're falling in Florida and Maine. (In Georgia, where data areavailable in terms of the race of the voter, the number of black voters voting early is rising, which can be read as another good sign for Democrats, since they are a reliably Democratic constituency.)

The bottom line: Republicans are seeing what they want higher rates of turnout among their voters.

Philip Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is based in New York City.

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