#1: Perdue edged out Ossoff by 1.78 points in the first round.
#2: Early vote data shows strong initial Democratic turnout, especially with Black voters.
#3: Polls give Democrats a *very slight* edge.
#1 favors GOP and #2/3 favor Democrats.
The ratings are based on my confidence in each side winning rather than the expected margins.
There's a lot of uncertainty in this election, and there are very strong arguments in favor of Republicans pulling this off.
A lot of this comes down to how revealing you think the early vote data is.
On one hand, many people have been burned by EV analysis in the past. The GOP can just show up on Election Day.
But there are a few factors that make EV potentially more interesting this time...
(2/6)
First, we have a decent baseline comparison of the November election. It's recent enough that there probably aren't a ton of people changing their minds.
This makes Early Vote analysis better than comparing 2012 to 2016, for example, when many people switched sides.
In the past, white working class voters voted more like the country as a whole, making these counties a good barometer for the country.
But in 2016, Trump made massive gains with white voters without a college degree, helping him win many bellwether counties by double-digits.
The bellwether counties actually became unrepresentative of America in 2016, when they voted 16 points to the right of the nation (versus 1 point to the left of the nation in 2012).
They only retained their bellwether status that year because Trump narrowly won the election.
Georgia Senate Early Votes by Race (12/21 update):
White: 54.4% (56.5% in general election)
Black: 32.4% (27.7% in general)
Hispanic: 1.9% (2.6% in general)
Asian: 2.1% (2.6% in general)
Native American: 0.1% (0.1% in general)
Other/Multiple/Unknown: 8.4% (10.5% in general)
Democrats will be happy that Black turnout is relatively strong so far. But they'll want to increase Hispanic/Asian turnout as well.
But important to keep in mind that it's still VERY early - there are 2 more weeks of voting left and a lot can change!
It is important to be **very careful** when looking at early vote data. 80% of Georgia's general election votes were cast early/by mail, but the 20% cast on election day was heavily Republican. And the 80-20 split may be different for the runoff.
- Kentucky is a heavily Republican state (Trump +26 in '20)
- Eastern Kentucky has gotten increasingly more Republican
- Senate results have become increasingly correlated with presidential results
One of the points in the article is that McGrath underperformed party registration statistics in rural Breathitt County, KY.
But the explanation is simple: over last 20 years, many former Democrats started voting Republican, but they just didn't update their party registration.
Another example raised is Elliott County, which never voted for McConnell before 2020.
But this is also easily explainable. The county used to be Democratic, but has gotten more Republican because of: (1) Policy issues like coal (2) Trump's gains with white working class voters