The Democratic vote increased 3 percentage points in a month in two Georgia special elections

Thanks to Shawn for running!

There were four special election runoffs in Georgia on Tuesday, not just the race for MTG’s old seat. All four ended with the former incumbent’s party keeping the seat. But comparing the results from November 2024, March 10, and April 7 there are terrifying portents for the Republicans in the two races they won (US House GA-14 and state Senate 53).

In the two races the Democrats won (state House 94 and 130), they could not improve on the 100% of the vote they won in 2024 but they equaled it in HD-94 this year (Georgia has a jungle primary like California so the first one narrowed it down to two of five original Dems). The Republicans did field two candidates this year in HD-130 and they got 28% and 29% of the vote in the two elections. So that was a massive improvement over 0% in 2024 (I don’t think the local Democratic Party is concerned). If the second place Democrat had gotten 8 more votes in the first round there would have been two Democrats in the runoff.

Here are the numbers for the two Republican seats (raw vote numbers from Ballotpedia):

US House GA-14	R	R	R	D	D
	MTG	Fuller	other R	Harris	other D	R tot	D tot	N	R %	D%
November 2024	243446			134759		243446	134759	378205	64%	36%
March 2026		40409	26567	43273	2870	66976	46143	113119	59%	41%
April 2026		72304		57030		72304	57030	129334	56%	44%
State Senate 53
	Moore	Thomas	other R	Bryant	Zibluck
November 2024	70397			18970		70397	18970	89367	79%	21%
March 2026		11794	10455		8226	22249	8226	30475	73%	27%
April 2026		22130			10098	22130	10098	32228	69%	31%

By the way, these overlap. The reason SS-53 was vacant is because Moore resigned to run for MTG’s vacant seat.

Not surprisingly, the R vote percentage drops from 2024 to March to April are similar in the two districts. SS-53 started from a higher percentage, which probably explains its slightly higher drops. A 5% drop over sixteen months should be concerning to them, but an additional 3% in the next month should be terrifying. This year these are the same groups of voters, mostly the same candidates, and about the same turnout so there aren’t many confounding variables that could explain away the shift.

The totals for both parties were up in the congressional runoff which isn’t surprising considering the amount of money dumped into that race. Still, the Democratic increase was almost double that of the Republicans.

In the state senate election the Republican vote actually dropped a bit while the Democratic vote went up a lot.

A big problem with interpreting Georgia election data is they don’t register voters by party. I would love to know how much of the improvement in our percentage is due to better turnout by our voters, worse turnout by theirs, or party flipping. That would have major implications for how to run campaigns this fall. Once this year’s election data gets into the VAN Georgia Democrats will be able to answer that question.