We're starting to get some votes and most of it is early and absentee votes, where Democrats were expected to fare well. In our view, Dems faring a hair better than expected in the absentee vote, but the big question mark is the Election Day vote and we still have very little
So far, Dems are faring net-4.5 pts better than we expected in the absentee vote and exactly as expected in the early vote.
We only have 2600 election day votes, so we'll wait on that but what little we have is in line with where the needle started the night
One easy way to track: our update-by-update log. So far, few surprises.
Ever so slightly, and that's why the needle has nudged its way ever so slightly to the left to start. But there's still a long way to go, and we know nothing about election day really
Ossoff and Warnock are both on track for victory with a greater than 95% chance to win, according to our estimates.
This is not a projection, but the remaining vote--including another 18k DeKalb early votes and nearly 100k absentee votes--overwhelmingly favors the Democrats
Ossoff's lead is still just slim enough that you do want to make sure that some of these late absentees and provisionals really materialize to the extent we expect. I'd think we could see some projections in the Warnock race tonight
But the remaining early in-person votes in DeKalb, alone, will give Ossoff the kind of lead that Biden had in the final count, and there's a lot more for him beyond that. So there may not be a call there tonight, but it's not serious doubt
I'm getting a lot of questions about the DeKalb County vote that remains. Apparently an election official said they only had 130k votes left, not 170k in-person early votes as they had previously said.
First and foremost, I think it's quite clear that it's 170k votes.
The state reports the early vote in great detail; and there were definitely 170k votes cast in-person in early voting in DeKalb County.
Now one possibility is that there's a reporting error--say, they uploaded 30k and called it in-person. I see no signs of that. The votes are left.
Results (for Ossoff) so far v. our pre-election expectations:
Absentee: D+4.1 better than we expected
Early: D+.3
Election day: D+1.3
--on turnout--
Early: 100% of expected
Absentee 98.4% (expect the remainder tmro/later)
Election day: 106% (good for GOP; not enough so far)
To circle back to a pre-election question, Ossoff is on track to net-400k out of the advance vote with 56.4%. Perdue on track to get net-370k out of election day, by our estimate, with 64.5%
And the overall turnout estimate is at 4.415 million at the moment, though the public tea leafs on election day ATL-area turnout suggest that will be a bit low
In testing, I've got to tell you that this won't always seem 'rational'--you can't see the turnout half of the equation, to take one obvious thing that was actually pretty important in the way the needle moved in November. But it's enjoyable imo
A few thoughts as we head into the polls closing. Let me start with the very most obvious one: this is not a regularly scheduled election, and that always makes it harder to predict
If this was regularly scheduled, we'd probably just call the clear GOP favorite. We had a 'perfect' poll of 5 million Georgians in November, and they favored Perdue. It's very hard to makeup a 2 point deficit on turnout, especially for the Democrats, in a high turnout race
But this is not a regularly scheduled election, and you can make up a 2 point deficit on turnout in this context. You can get an AL Senate special result that just wouldn't have happened if it had been scheduled in Nov 2018
Let's talk about what the GOP, and more specifically David Perdue, needs to do on Election Day in order to prevail. It's nothing impossible, in my view. But it's worth thinking through where the GOP burden stands after the strong Democratic early vote in Georgia
Let's stipulate for this whole discussion that absolutely no one has changed their vote since the election.
If so, then our estimate is that Ossoff will amass a lead of around 350k out of the advance vote, including what he'll net out of ~100k absentee votes still to arrive
There's some fuzziness on any estimate like this, of course. But the fundamentals here are pretty straightforward, and clear to anyone with a voter file, based on the partisan makeup of the vote and the vigorous Black turnout. It's confirmed in our NYT/Siena poll data as well