I have upgraded my prediction from Warnock +4 to Warnock +5 for a variety of reasons.
First, there are lots of mail ballots still to arrive and be counted and those are going favor Warnock overwhelmingly. During the general election, Warnock even won the mail ballot count in rock solid Republican counties like Hall, Forsyth, and Cherokee. At the end of the early voting period for this runoff, the total vote count stood at about 1,852,000. That has already grown by about 15,000 votes with the arrival of more mail ballots and there are approximately 60,000 mail votes outstanding on top of that, over half of which are from the Atlanta metro area. Of the 75,000 mail ballots that will have been included in the total since early in-person voting ended, Warnock should win at least 75% of them, for a net gain of 37,500. And that’s probably a conservative estimate.
Secondly, Herschel Walker is a one-person gaffe and scandal machine. He somehow doesn’t even realize that the Senate has already been decided in favor of Democrats. And then there’s the highly disturbing revelation from this morning that I won’t even get into. Are middle of the road Republicans really going to bust their butts to get to the polls tomorrow for this guy?
Thirdly, it’s supposed to rain off and on over much of Georgia tomorrow. If that does suppress turnout at all, it’s going to hurt Walker more, because Warnock already has a sizeable lead in the early vote and it’s Walker who’s going to need astronomical turnout on election day.
My estimate is that if you account for all early votes, including in-person, drop-off, and mail, Warnock should have a lead of about 310,000 going into tomorrow morning. That’s actually a rosier scenario than other data crunchers are giving but I’m gonna stick with it. I believe Walker will win the election day count by a little over 140,000 votes (or about 10 percentage points) and that gives us:
Warnock 1,746,675 (52.5%)
Walker 1,580,325 (47.5%)
Total Votes Cast: 3,327,000
I’m pegging the election day turnout at 1,400,000. I know that’s a bit bigger than what many election forecasters are saying. My feeling is that even though the rain will dampen turnout a bit, there are still many Atlanta area voters that wanted to vote early and didn’t get a chance to because of the long lines.
There’s a really great website called georgiavotesvisual.com, where you can look at turnout levels in the runoff for each precinct so far. It also shows you how turnout in the early vote for the runoff looks in comparison to the general.
There’s another great website HERE which shows a prediction of Warnock +3 based on modeling. In any event, I hope and expect that we are all going to be happy with the outcome tomorrow evening.