GA Early Voting Update 10/28
Good afternoon, this is an early voting email update that I'll try to maintain going forward through election day. On election day, I'll use this same email to send out turnout updates and analysis. When I use "we" I mean Democrats, "they" I mean Republicans etc.
Right now I'm looking at the early vote in 2 different ways. The first looks at it through the lens of 2018 voters. We know that the 2018 election was very close in Georgia, with Republicans getting between 50-52% of the vote. Of the approximately 3.7m voters still registered who voted in 2018, party modeling predicts that we would lose by around -20,000 votes.
As of 10/27, 1.38mm people have voted early. Modeling suggests that we would win 52% of these votes, for a margin of +55,000 votes. If you assume that all remaining 2018 voters who haven't voted yet will also vote, the vote share is 50.0% and a +500 vote win. This means that the NET new voters (who did not vote in 2018) are +21,000 for Democrats (54% share, 237k voters).
After a very strong first week of early voting, Republicans have been holding their own this week. They won early voting by about -3,000 votes out of around 127k votes that came in yesterday. However, this represents a better day for Democrats than the other days this week. And importantly, most of the votes that Republicans are banking were 2018 voters who were already expected to vote. Even as they "won" the day, we moved from negative to positive on the Early+2018 voter count for the first time.
I have one other way of looking at the turnout, which is through the lens of the 2021 vote. The 2021 runoff features three main voting methods - absentee by mail (Democrats won these votes by about 350k), advance in person (Democrats won these votes by about 50k), and election day voting (Republicans won these votes by about -350k). So far, 39% of advance in person voters from '21 have voted early (and Republicans are slightly winning them, which is a small improvement over '21), 38% of absentee by mail voters from '21 have voted early (and Democrats are slightly over-performing with them relative to '21). Only 8% of election day voters from '21 have voted early, and Republicans are slightly over-performing with them. 3% of '21 non-voters have voted early, and Democrats are slightly winning them, although there is likely more modeling uncertainty with new non-voters. They are 28% black and only 54% white, whereas all early voters are 30% black and 58% white.
We know that Republicans are likely to have a good election day, so Democrats will look to bank big vote leads starting this weekend and into the final week of early voting. The Republican day of trend is as follows - Kemp won election day by -94k in 2018, Trump won election day by -220k in 2020 and David Perdue won election day by an incredible -358k in the 2021 runoff.
There are about 131k absentee by mail votes that have yet to be returned, Democrats would win them by around 30k votes if they all came back. That, plus the votes that are already in, would put us at around 85k, or just under Kemp's 2018 election day margin. One caveat is that candidates may not perform the same as in the past. In public polling, Warnock seems to be capturing most of the prior Biden vote, and right now this looks like it will be similar to the 2020 election, where Biden slightly defeated Trump.
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