ATLANTA – With Senate control at stake, Georgians are showing up to vote in significant numbers ahead of the important January 5 elections.
As of Monday morning, 2.13 million voters, representing 27.5 percent of all registered voters in the state, cast their votes in the races that Republican Sens Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are addressing against Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. With so much going on, and with such a huge stream of attention, advertising and funds flowing to Georgia, the state’s voters mobilized during early voting.
‘Normally you would hope for 50 percent of the general election [total] Georgia political analyst Fred Hicks says in a run-off, that would amount to 2.5 million votes. With another four days of early voting, plus election day, it looks like Georgia will exceed the historic norms for a run-off election.
The U.S. election project, an impartial source of information at the University of Florida, released data through Dec. 28. The demographic distribution indicates that the races are just as close as polls indicate.
The current polling average of FiveThirtyEight has Perdue ahead of Ossoff with the smallest margin – 47.9 percent to 47.8 percent – and Warnock ahead of Loeffler with 1 percentage point, 48.3 percent to 47.3 percent.
Since no candidate won a 50 percent majority in the November general election, both Senate seats in Georgia are up for grabs. Republicans currently have a 50-48 elected majority in the Senate. The two elections in Georgia will determine whether the Republicans will continue to control the upper chamber, or the incoming Biden government will be able to break a potential death knell of 50-50 with the election of Vice President Kamala Harris.
In November, Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since 1992. The victory gave the Democrats in Georgia hope to turn around their Senate seats, but Biden’s narrow margin of victory – only about 12,000 votes – shows that the results of the races are far from certain.
More than half of all votes cast so far in Georgia’s Senate poll – 57 percent – come from voters 56 and older, while less than 15 percent from voters 34 and younger, according to statistics released by the U.S. Election Project set up. This is a significant change compared to the general election, when about 46 percent of all early ballots came from voters 56 and older, while nearly 21 percent of voters were 34 and younger.
White voters cast 55 percent of all early votes, while black voters cast nearly 32 percent. The total number of white voters is almost identical to the early ballot box during the general election, while the black turnout is higher than 27.7 percent in November.
“The electorate so far is more ethnically diverse than Republicans want, but is older than the Democrats want it,” Hicks said. “That’s why you see Republicans campaigning for the rural vote in Georgia and why you see Democrats putting harder pressure on digital and where younger voters are.”
In recent weeks, every party has brought in high-profile surrogates to reach out to the campaign, including Biden and Harris, as well as President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and donations have poured in from across the country.
All the attention on the state can work. Nearly 69,000 voters who did not vote in the general election had already voted in the run-up to the election. In elections where the margin between victory and defeat is paper thin, that bloc alone can determine the outcomes, and in turn the control of the Senate and the fate of Biden’s agenda.
The question for Republicans is how much Trump’s ongoing criticism of the election process will hurt the turnout. Trump, who is expected to visit the state again on the eve of the election, continued to push unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in Georgia, attacking government officials despite the fact that Georgia had several reports that everyone had a Biden victory tone. Loeffler and Perdue, meanwhile, have quietly returned from Trump’s allegations; even Loeffler’s nickname for her December move by the state – the Senate Firewall Tour – is an implicit acknowledgment of Biden’s victory, as Democratic control of the Senate would not be possible unless Trump lost in November.
“There is a very real possibility that the conversation about a difficult election is suppressing the fringe Republican voter,” Hicks said. “This is the crux of what I call the Trump election dilemma: how to get the Trump voters back without the Trump baggage that Republican voters dropped on Biden.”
The challenge for Democrats, on the other hand, is figuring out how to attract nearly 100,000 voters who vote for Biden, but in turn did not vote for Ossoff. (Warnock was part of an overcrowded constituency that made direct statistical comparisons less accurate.) Some of the voters simply did not vote for any Senate candidate, but the question for Democrats is how to attract the voters who Trump explicitly rejected while remaining loyal to Republican candidates further down.
Early voting in Georgia continues until December 31st. Ballot papers for absentees must be requested on 1 January. Election day is January 5th. State election officials may begin processing ballot boxes 15 days before election day, but the ballot papers may not be tabulated before the ballot boxes close.
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