Warnock wins Tuesday by 30k votes
Another huge early vote day that was closer to even than prior days but I still have Warnock coming out with a more than +30k edge or about a 10% win on the day. Now have Warnock +194k, or close to the +255k or so he finished general early vote at.
Let's look at some simple metrics - we'd expect this mix of counties at these numbers to be 30% black and the black percentage is actually 35%. What does that mean that we'd expect it to be 30% black? Well it simply means that when we dump 21k early votes from Forsyth County into the statewide total we'd expect roughly 670 of those voters (or 3%) to be black but in reality it's 844 (or 4%).
When we look at a similar day total wise from the general election (after 10/22 when there were 814k total votes) the electorate was 33% black. So, the expectation of 30% is more of a final early vote total and we expect black voters to be frontloaded into the weekend voting, but 35 over 33 is still a nice edge and lines up with an electorate that if you're Warnock you hope will be closer to the '21 runoff from a black perspective than the '22 general which was about a point less black.
Similarly on partisan edge, we'd expect this mix of counties to produce a +3% D-R edge (early vote ended at +1% in the general) but right now we're sitting at +14%. And back on 10/22 we were sitting at +6%. So comparing the first 800k or so voters who have voted early this time to the first 800k in the general, we're seeing proportionally more Democratic enthusiasm, although when we look at the black number alone, we'd have to guess that non-black Democrats are driving their fair share of it.
Now, again, let's look at Forsyth. At this level of turnout (21k) we'd expect roughly 3,100 voters to have Democratic primary history and about 10,300 to have Republican primary history. That would be an edge of -35% for the Republicans. This is one of those ancestral GOP counties where Republican primary history is a bit of a lagging indicator and Dems do better than that edge, in the early vote from the general election Warnock did 3% better on the margin than the difference between Dems and Reps would have predicted, which means some Republicans vote Democratic or the non-primary voters lean more to the Dem side, or a combination of both.
Well, in actuality, we're seeing 4,300 vs 3,100 expected Dems vs 10,500 compared to 10,300 Republicans. So - good Republican turnout. But GREAT Democratic turnout. It adds up to a -30% edge. Can that be sustained by Democrats? Well it was -26% after Monday, so things are getting more Republican, but it's a nice relative lead for Dems to start with that Republicans need to do a lot of chipping away at. And remember that while the black number was a lot higher than expected, this is not a very black county. 1,200 more Dems than expected here, maybe 1/5 of that is driven by black turnout. Bigger than expected numbers from Asian and white Dems here as well.
So anyway the moral of today is that as you see people spin the early vote whatever way they want to spin it, remember that under the hood it still look really good for Democrats. Warnock is likely on pace to beat or exceed his early vote margin from the general. If total runoff turnout is lower, it would be hard for me to see how he wouldn't be favored if that is the case. It's also kind of amazing to think that as recent as 2018, we had a runoff for SOS and PSC that only drew about 1.5mm voters. Dems got a little over 48% in that runoff, which really just proves that raw turnout alone does not tell the story in this state like it once did.