Over 1,123,000 people have cast a vote in the Senate runoff elections in Georgia. Over 30,000 of them did not vote in the general election in November.
Let's start with some demographic breakdowns. The electorate so far is much more racially diverse than we'd expect at this point, but closer to our expectations from an age perspective.
The current electorate is just under 55% white. If we include everyone with an approved, outstanding mail ballot that number drops below 54%.
Just as a comparison, the early voting electorate in the general was 56.6% white.
Now let's look geographically. North GA is looking like a problem for the Republicans.
GA-09 and GA-14 were both very active early vote centers in the general as they had the 4th and 5th best showing of any congressional district vs their 2016 vote totals.
Now, both of those regions are middle of the pack or worse at the 6th and 10th best turnout against 2020 early vote totals.
Republicans can take some solace that GA-06 and GA-07 are doing even worse right now from a votes perspective but both of those districts have 70,000+ outstanding mail ballots that will quickly move them up the charts.
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Ok, as promised I dug into the numbers a little more. Particularly around how people voted in the 2020 primary. There are better ways to estimate overall partisanship, but I've stuck with this for now.
First, I want to let folks revisit the breakdown of D and R primary voters who have voted so far, vs the breakdown through the first week of early voting in the general.
Dem "lead" is 154k vs 181k in the general on lower overall turnout. That's about D +16% vs D +17.4%.
This also lines up with what Nate Cohn has been posting about, which looks at this a lot more thoroughly than I think I am. Dems are doing well, but not necessarily as well as they were at this point in the general.
Welcome to the first day of early voting in Georgia's runoff election! The data is going to get a lot fuller and more interesting starting tomorrow, but today we can see where we ended up during the mail-only voting period.
Applications are up to 1.22M, within 7% of where we were for the 2020 general when in-person voting started even with much less time for people to get their applications in.
The racial breakdown for these applicants are much more non-white than what we saw in the general, when about 60% of early voters were white.
Now, this is a dangerous game to play but I've started looking at some numbers based on the # of applications in so far, and the results from the 2020 general election in each county for mail votes.
First, these metrics were very different for President and the 2 Senate races.
Biden won the mail vote by 398,572 votes (65/34)
Ossoff won by 333,437 (62/36)
Combined D's in the special won by 336,740 (62/36)
Yesterday we recorded 32,000 more applications and 42,500 more votes. Vote by mail applications are now within 9% of the general election's total at this point.
Little updates from another dozen counties, and we're up to 55 total counties certified (out of 159 total, for those of you not familiar with Georgia).