Thread by @Nate_Cohn

Another day of strong early voting in Georgia, with another 154k voters turning out in person yesterday. That's similar to but slightly behind the fourth day of early voting in the general, which was at 164k

Cumulatively, we're still running ahead of the general election on in-person early voting, but I don't think anyone expects that to last--and there's a very long time left for that flip to happen

As I've said, the big takeaway is that the turnout looks like it will be healthy and high, and it's not obvious who it will help v. the general. As I've mentioned, there are crosscutting patterns at play that make it difficult to sort out where we'll end up. Let's look at a few

One is that there are fewer absentee votes--and those are heavily Democratic.
This is expected: far fewer realistic opportunities for voters to request a ballot for this special than the general. And some counties may be behind

Now, of course, if in-person and election day voting drop just as much (or more), then this isn't actually an issue for Democrats at all. That would have been a very reasonable assumption before early voting. Now I'm not totally sure! We'll have to wait and see

If it does turn out that the early voting drops by less than absentee voting, then Democrats will probably need to do better in the in-person early vote than they did for the general, as some number of ge absentee voters turn out in person instead

There's some case that might be happening. Over all, 8% of in-person early voters were ge abs voters, and this is a Dem group.
And this week, there's been a bit of a trend toward Dems v. the ge, with yesterday Dems plainly faring better for the first time

After yesterday, there's now no difference in the partisan composition of in-person early voters v. the general election.
And again, if the absentee vote drops off more than early vote, Dems will want to compensate by finishing better in early than they did in the general

Until then (or until early voting drops off a lot), Dems will run a bit behind the general election on the total advanced vote, including abs+in person. Again, I'm not sure they should be expected to run even yet, given abs dropoff. But in the end, this is the thing to watch

We won't know how either of these trends wind up working themselves out until the end of the early voting process. And even then, we're not going to be able to say too much.

And on a few questions:
--demographically, vt is similar to the general so far; similar enough to avoid parsing at this stage
--i'm not interested in the new voters tbh. in fact, i'm not sure there's ever been an election where i'm less interested in new voters