Saturday voting - maybe it was smart for GOP counties to sit out
Most Republican counties opted out of Saturday voting. And Democrats took big advantage. Nearly 72k in person or mail ballots were cast yesterday and Dems racked up a giant margin.
Using a very dumb "model" of partisan-ship edge by county and comparing to the early votes and the known results from the first round, I have Warnock now at a +50k edge, +44k of it came yesterday.
Of course, part of that edge comes from what counties are open. But, even factoring that out, we'd expect the early vote to be about 35% in these counties and it's 47%. We'd expect a D-R edge of 17%, and it's 40%. Remember that Warnock led at a 26% black electorate in the first round that was -5% D-R.
So, should the Republican counties have joined in? Well on the one hand, I believe the more opportunities you give reluctant Herschel voters the better. A Republican who is leaning against participating might just see something on Fox News that gets them fired up, if they're driving by a polling place that's open maybe they stop and vote. Maybe later that day they see Walker's latest late night horror movie review and regret their vote - but it's already been cast. Well if that Republican lives in most counties in Georgia, they didn't have that opportunity this weekend. Better hope Herschel takes his Ambien this week.
Here's the flip side to the "strategy". Even in a massively Republican county like Walton early voting was disproportionately dominated by Democrats. Cumulatively (and there will be regression to the mean) we'd expect a -38% edge for Republicans over Democrats. After one Saturday, it's only -7%. We'd expect black voters to make up 15% of Walton's electorate, they make up 27% so far. So maybe Republicans knew what they were doing after-all and restricting early voting in their counties is a wash that inconveniences Democrats in exchange for suppressing their own votes? I don't think they thought that far ahead, but if I'm the Republicans, I'm looking at Walton county and saying Democrats are already at 14% of their 3-week early vote total after one Saturday while Republicans are only at 5% of their early vote total. Remember that's comparing like to like.
In fact for the state as a whole, 4% of the early turnout has returned, but it's 6% for Dems and only 2% for Republicans. And even in counties where a substantial % of the early vote is already in, there's a D edge. Douglas started the earliest, 18% back with a 21-16 Dem advantage. 14% of Crawford county has voted, but it's 24% of Dems vs only 11% of Republicans.
Could this be an early sneak peak that Republicans have an enthusiasm problem? It's hard to tell, but so far you can't find a county which had at least one day of early voting where Republicans are out-performing their early share.
It looks like Sunday will be another huge day. Warnock finished early voting with a +255k lead over Walker, then lost election day by -217k or so. After Sunday, Warnock could already have a +100k vote lead in the bank. Here's a daily graph that shows the main categories I reference (Black %, Predicted Black %, D-R%, Predicted D-R% and Warnock Edge).
