The Des Moines Register has done a deep dive into the early voting voter files and discovered that the Republicans are indeed eating into their election day margins by encouraging more people to vote by absentee. However, it’s very valuable to bank your voters early so you can focus your election day turnout efforts on less reliable people.

What’s consistently missing from these kinds of analyses is that the main contest in Iowa on Tuesday is the governor’s race, and all the polls show that the incumbent Republican governor has an overwhelming lead, perhaps exceeding twenty percentage points. So, given that the biggest race on the ballot is not remotely competitive, we shouldn’t expect the early voting numbers to look good at all for the Democrats.

And they do look pretty bad if you look at just the raw numbers of registered Democrats who have voted relative to registered Republicans and compare the difference to past elections. Normally, the Democrats bank a much bigger advantage during early voting. But, as I have already said, the Register‘s analysis shows that the Republicans have cut into this advantage to a significant degree by getting their Election Day voters to cast their votes early. Democrats are doing a better job of getting new voters to the polls.

The real story out of Iowa is that there is a very large universe of voters who are going to vote for the Republican governor despite not being registered Republicans, and a very large segment of these Branstad voters are not going to vote for the lunatic Joni Ernst. This set of pro-Branstad anti-Ernst voters is made up of independent and Democratic registrants, and their size will determine the winner of the Senate race. There will even be a few registered Republicans in this group, albeit Iowa is not Kansas.

When the leader of the state party in a very popular incumbent governor, all other candidates from that party who are running for statewide office should be able to win easily unless there is something desperately wrong with them, and there are definitely a few things desperately wrong with Joni Ernst. Her lunacy is putting what should be a slam dunk election at risk. She’s literally on the verge of blowing it in humiliating fashion.

But is this how the press is reporting on this race?

In any case, with the Dems on the verge of getting crushed in the governor’s race, the numbers on early voting start to look pretty damn good. Yes, they look shitty compared to the past, but they look great in the context of getting beat like a drum in the most important statewide race. Obviously, a lot of independents and Democrats (and even some Republicans) who have voted early for Branstad have also voted early for Braley.

Braley could pull this out after all.