First runoff early vote update
First a word - I think McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund ad with Kemp really misreads the landscape. It reminds me of national Republicans who were convinced a massive red wave was there and all they had to do was attack Biden. I read a term in a midterm recap that I liked - “Strategic Biden Voters”. They voted Biden to get rid of Trump, but they did not embrace pro-Trump/anti-Biden messaging in the midterm. What a good name for the Warnock/Kemp voters. Kemp has a lot of personal appeal, but bashing Biden in an ad and offering Herschel (a candidate that these strategic Biden voters have largely already rejected) in my opinion won’t do much. As a native Georgian can I also offer that Kemp’s pronunciation is too Southern. Seeing him butcher Biden’s name certainly takes him down a few notches in my estimation of how well he might do nationally as a Presidential contender.
On to the minimal early vote. Really don’t want to read too much into about ~18k votes. But in comparing the early vote by county to the final early vote, right now we would expect the early vote to be around 35% black and so far it is 38%. Owing largely to the fact that most of the early vote is absentee by mail, it’s also way more Democratic than what we’d expect. We ended early/absentee in the general at +1% D-R and that was worth 55% of the two-way vote for Warnock or a +255k margin. Election day was a lot more Republican, leading to a red shift of -3% less black, and -5% more Republican leaning. Warnock lost election day by -217k, leading to a +38k overall win.
So again, based on county totals only we’d predict a +9%D electorate and so far we’re at +26%D. Now look, I don’t expect for early voting to produce anything like a +26% OR a +9% D advantage. I think Dems will be happy with an early vote that replicates the first round, or with lower turnout, one that produces a bit higher edge. But these numbers are encouraging so far. Douglas is the county with the most representative early vote so far as it started early voting fastest, it has voted 14% of it’s general election early total and is 2% blacker than predicted and 8% more Democratic than predicted. So - could that be early signs of a red wave receding? Who knows - enjoy the soccer.