GA Early Voting Update 11/04
The hope was that we’d have a strong Thursday and Friday and at the very least Thursday was strong and I’m seeing a lot of photos of long lines in places that should be Democratic friendly for today’s voting. Yesterday we were just shy of +79k with what was in and today we are at +86k so a big win, even though black % ticked down slightly from 29.2% to 29.1%. We have just under 2.3mm voters. On roughly the same day in 2020 my numbers showed us at 3.6mm voted at 28.0% black.
Still looking a lot to the new voters for powering the lead. 456k people who didn’t vote in ‘18 have shown up, and they remain ~56% Democratic. They should deliver a +52k margin. That’s about 2/3 of the total margin, but a key thing is - we’re likely leading with the 2018 voters who have shown up also. Which is great news. Just looking at those 2018 voters, we’ve got 51% of all 2018 black voters already casting a ballot vs 48% overall / 48% white, 38% Asian, 29% Hispanic.
And now let’s look at age - only 23% of 18-30 voters who voted in ‘18 have voted early (86k total), but an incredible 112k who didn’t vote last time who are in that age cohort have turned out. So you’re seeing strong turnout in the younger age groups for new voters, and I expect a lot of younger people will vote on election day. It’s kind of a similar story for Asians and Hispanics, only 38% of ‘18 voters who are Asian have shown back up (that’s 25k out of 66k total) but 17k who didn’t vote before have shown up.
I continue to believe these numbers overall are kind of neutral. We still don’t know what election day brings, but this doesn’t look like a red wave. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, but our most reliable voters (black voters) are showing strong numbers, and if there were general weakness among Dem leaning groups, you’d expect to see some weakness there. How could someone like Herschel get 20% of the black vote? Well let’s say you have 100 black Biden voters that Biden won 88-12. For every 100, 10 of the 12 Walker voters show back up, only 40 of the 88 Biden voters show up. There wasn’t any persuasion but Walker wins 10/50 that came back = 20%. I just don’t think that’s what we’re saying, again maybe I’m wrong. We’ll find out.
If you want to say maybe you can see a bit of a Dobbs effect, I’m looking at the 3.4mm registered voters who didn’t bother showing up in the ‘21 runoff. 210k have voted (6.1%). We’d win them by about ~+8k votes. But within that group, new turnout for men is 5.6% and new turnout for women is 6.6%. So, you’re seeing a small turnout differential with voters who skipped the high turnout ‘21 election.
There’s 70k absentee ballots yet to come back or get processed. If they all come back we’d win them by +18k. They won’t all come back, but we’ve been seeing 10k a day this week or so, and there’s 5 more days for them to get back, so maybe we get 35k back or something in that range. Those numbers will be small, but I’ll do a Sunday/Monday/Tuesday update because they should be a nice small pad to the Dem #s.
OK, so bottom line. We’re at +86k. Kemp won election day by -94k in ‘18. Marist poll said in a split electorate that 40% of Republican will vote on election day and 30% of Dems/Independents will vote on election day. That kind of seems consistent with estimates. Our any early+any remaining ‘18 voter electorate is now officially slightly over 4.2mm. I have it at a +32k Dem margin. Again you can think of this as like what should Warnock or a generic Democrat get. No guarantees.
I think we cross over 2.5mm today, and definitely with remaining absentee votes to count over the weekend. If you’re dooming on Democrats not showing up on election day, of the roughly 1.9mm ‘18 voters who have yet to cast a ballot (most of them are young people), 398k voted in this year’s Republican primary and 88% of them voted in person, and 152k voted in this year’s Democratic primary and an almost similar 83% voted in person. I continue to believe that a lot of people have just made the switch back to in-person now that the pandemic is mostly considered to be over. Lot of long lines today, usually no lines on Tuesday. Do the math!