As expected, it was a huge day for early voting in Georgia yesterday. Over 380,000 people voted by mail, ballot dropoff, or in person. Lines stretched as long as three hours in Atlanta.
By examining the electorate yesterday, we can see some encouraging signs. 24% of yesterday’s voters were under the age of 40. 44% of yesterday’s voters were non-white, up from 42% the previous day.
As of now, about 1,850,000 people have voted in the runoff election.
Here’s is the demographic composition of all voters from the duration of the early voting period in the runoff.
White 55.0%
Black 31.8%
Hispanic 1.7%
Asian 1.8%
Other 9.6%
Female 55.9%
Male 43.8%
Unknown .4%
18-25 5.3%
26-40 10.5%
41-65 48.4%
Over 65 35.8%
Unknown .2%
This is different from how things looked at the end of the early voting period from the general election. At that point, things looked like this:
White 57.2%
Black 29.1%
Hispanic 1.9%
Asian 1.9%
Other 9.7%
Female 55.4%
Male 44.0%
Unknown .6%
18-25 5.2%
26-40 12.2%
41-65 49.5%
Over 65 32.7%
As we can see, the electorate for the early voting period of the runoff is more diverse than from the same period of the general election, so that’s something we can be happy about. The average age seems to be a bit higher though.
With regard to the Big Four counties of Cobb, Dekalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett, they accounted for 33% of votes cast yesterday, which is their exact proportion of Georgia’s population as a whole. And that’s exactly the same percentage as the day before in the early voting. As it stands now, these four counties account for 35.6% of all votes cast. This is good news because Warnock will get big margins from these four counties.
Regarding two solidly Republican Atlanta area counties that I mentioned yesterday — Coweta and Cherokee — the turnout has been pretty dismal throughout the early voting window. Coweta stands at just 46% of the total votes they had at this point during the general. That is actually the second lowest percentage out of all of Georgia’s 159 counties. Cherokee isn’t much better at 57%. By comparison, Fulton is at about 68%, Cobb is at 76%, Dekalb is also at 76%, and Gwinnett is at 72%. It’s important to note, however, that Hall County — another Republican county in the Atlanta area — and a bunch of nearby rural Republican counties, have had very good turnout.
The highly significant counties of Richmond (Augusta), Muscogee (Columbus), and Clarke (Athens) are above 85% of their EV vote from the general, even in this compressed early voting period. That is very good news for us.
My official prediction for this contest is Warnock wins it 52% to 48%. I think Republican turnout will be good on election day, but by looking at the early vote, we can see that Warnock’s supporters are slightly more enthusiastic about their candidate than the other guy’s are.
Be sure to visit Warnock for Georgia to see how you can help Senator Warnock run through the tape and win this thing!