Obama won Omaha, Nebraska.  (Nebraska and Maine are the only states that split its electoral votes.)

The latest on early voting turnout:

The numbers themselves are staggering.

“The aggregate number was shocking,” said Michael McDonald, an associate professor at George Mason University who compiles early-voting statistics, who added that his running total of early voters now tops 16.5 million. “Looking at them, they’re defying all the trends we’ve seen in early voting.”

He and others estimate that as many as a third of all voters may cast a ballot before Nov. 4, about double the proportion who did so in 2000. Four years ago, approximately one in five voters voted before Election Day.

Also of note: Obama is winning among early voters with 59% of the total, according to polls.  That’s the mirror image of results from 2000 and 2004, when Bush won close to 60% of early votes.

The folks over at NRO are eager to paint the lower-than-expected early turnout in Ohio as a bad sign for Obama’s GOTV efforts.  I’m not sure what to make of it myself, but would note that there’s still lots of time left until those ballots are due.

Meanwhile, North Carolina officials are bracing themselves for high early voting numbers there.  And, in Georgia, the people are already coming in droves:

“We are just tickled to death that people are coming out and doing all this voting,” said Lynn Ledford, voter registration and elections director for Gwinnett County. “It’s just great.”

Apparently lighter than expected, but still pretty darn high:

Elections officials said more than 4,000 people cast early votes in Franklin County, including 668 who also registered to vote, then immediately cast a ballot.

About 2,300 voted in Hamilton County, home to Cincinnati, and around 3,000 voted in Cuyahoga County, the state’s most populous county and a rich source of Democratic votes.

This is the first presidential election in Ohio in which all voters can vote absentee, either by mail or in person.

Adding to the interest was a quirk in Ohio law that for one week allows people to register to vote and then immediately cast a ballot.

The window to register and then vote survived a challenge in federal courts by the Ohio Republican Party, which claimed the process was illegal and would favor Democratic voters.

Both parties were making pushes this weekend for early voters.

This Sarah Silverman video makes me wish I were Jewish.

An interesting dispatch from Colorado over at FiveThirtyEight.com, comparing the campaigns’ organizational strategies:

To be a professional poker player, one success principle you must learn is “Losing the Minimum.” Everyone who plays seriously knows that players go through stretches where they can’t catch a break and make a series of strong 2d-best hands that cost them money. It’s structurally and statistically built in that you’re supposed to lose certain hands. The most skilled players know how to keep their cool and lose the minimum on hands they are supposed to lose. More than figuring out how to profit when you get pocket aces or flop set over set in poker (because almost everyone knows how to win those hands), it’s how to sense situational danger and avoid it that builds your bankroll in the long run. Your bankroll grows from the bets you save.

In the organizing world, Barack Obama’s aggressive willingness to go into all corners of the state of Colorado (and Nevada, and New Mexico) is going to keep his losses to the minimum in areas he is supposed to lose. “Losing the minimum” is the mantra. And in Boulder, with McCain’s field team abdicating the field, Obama can “extract the maximum” with no counterweight.

This post over on The Democratic Strategist analyzes the campaigns’ relative financial states in a bit more detail.  While Obama is on track to far out-raise McCain’s federal election grant, the RNC can obviously continue to fundraise and so far has much more cash on hand than does the DNC.  Matt Compton says that despite the current figures, Obama’s still okay:

First, we shouldn’t assume that Obama’s fundraising is going to peak in August — far from it. In fact, we already have some indication of how this new month is going to look for the campaign. The day after Sarah Palin spoke at the Republican National Convention, the Obama camp announced that it had raised $10 million in 24 hours. Today we learned that the campaign raised $11 million at a posh fundraiser in California in the span of a couple of hours last night. A big chunk of that Hollywood money is going into the coffers of the DNC, but at this point, that hardly matters. Even for the Obama campaign $21 million dollars in just two days is astounding. And I’m absolutely positive that the September 26th debate in Oxford, Mississippi will be another jaw-dropping night for fundraising.

Second, part of the reason the McCain camp was able to take the federal money is because the campaign is choosing to outsource its ground operation to the Republican National Committee, which simply doesn’t plan to field a turnout effort as extensive as the one being built by the Obama camp. That choice reflects a definite difference in priorities between the two camps. Republicans are gambling that they can win this election from the top down: controlling news cycles, funding extensive TV advertising, and fielding a 48 hour GOTV program that has been successful in the past. The Obama campaign is waging everything on winning from the ground up: they’re training and organizing volunteers, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters, microtargeting persuadable demographics, and planning to win the election the same way the won the primary — by making sure all their voters show up at the polls. Even still, they’re spending as much as McCain on TV advertising in almost every battleground state (except Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and spending far more than McCain in some states like Virginia.

At this point, I still pretty good about betting money on Obama.

It’s interesting that Matt seems to write off the Republican GOTV strategy, as that strategy has been widely admired and praised in the past few elections.  They’ve focused more on local volunteers–often organizing through churches–to convince their neighbors to vote, rather than bringing in college kids from four states over to talk to people they don’t know.  They’ve been big on microtargeting, too, if I remember correctly.  Obama is an organizer by training, so I’m sure his plan is at least as good–but is it really that much better?  This has been the Dems’ big weakness in recent years, so it will be very impressive if he can turn the tables so quickly.