Big Monday Vote - for Dems!
Including absentee ballots I booked +321k new votes for Monday, of which I'm told 300k were in person, which is a record. You might think after the big weekend for Dems huge numbers like that might mean a Republican catch up.
But you would be wrong. A few metrics came down to earth a bit - the black % of the electorate so far went from 46% to 38% and the D-R% of the electorate went from +45% to +21%. But both of those are big over-performances relative to what you'd expect from the county totals. We'd expect a 31% black electorate and a +6% D-R electorate at 500k votes from these particular counties.
My Jon Ralston style dumb model predicts that Warnock has banked a +163k vote lead, up from +113k over the weekend. Now it's worth looking at a similar day in the general election to get some idea of where things might be at. After 10/20, there had been 572k votes. The D-R advantage was +6% (vs +21% right now) and the black % then was 33% (vs 38% now).
So you're just seeing a lot of enthusiasm. One thing I decided to look at was splitting all the counties between those that had Saturday or Sunday voting and those which did not (and presumably Monday was their first day). Sat/Sun counties make up the vast majority of the state's population and they are also heavily Democratic. Their early vote now equals 23% of the general election early count. Within those counties, the Dem count is at 29% and the Rep count is at only 16%. The black % is 45% vs an expected 38% and the D/R difference is +38 on an expected +21. So you can see the value of early vote. Warnock probably leads by +195k votes, and that is something like +60k better than what you'd expect.
BUT - in the largely Republican counties that only offered Monday voting so far, you also see a Dem skew (though not as big). In these counties, where only 15% of the early vote total is in, for Dems it is 21% and for Reps it is only 15%. The black vote is 22% vs an expected 17%, and the D/R difference is -18% (Rep favored here) but it SHOULD be -28%. Walkers leads by only -32k votes here, but he should be leading by -48k here.
The bottom line is that it's just one day, but Democratic enthusiasm is very high everywhere and Republican enthusiasm seems to just be so-so. I am hearing that turnout could be even higher today, and seeing a lot of pictures of long lines everywhere, so I imagine it will be another good day for Democrats.
Some surprising places where Warnock would lead if they stopped voting after Monday, according to my dumb model: Columbia County, Houston County, Laurens County, Lowndes County, Spalding County, Troup County. With the exception of maybe Houston County I wouldn't expect most of that to hold, but some of these counties have a significant % of their prior early total in and just massive edge for Democrats at this point.
I'd be worried if I was the GOP.