Early-vote turnout

Strong early-vote turnout gives Dems hope in Georgia runoffs

Democrats are encouraged by stats that show their voters are overperforming with early voting set to conclude later this week.

By JAMES ARKIN

Early voting in the Georgia Senate runoffs is breaking records — and Democrats have reasons for hope in the numbers.

More than 2.3 million people have voted as of Tuesday morning through mail-in ballots or in-person early voting for the two races, already topping the record for the most votes in a Georgia runoff election.

Democrats are buoyed by the strong early vote numbers, which show Black voters making up a larger percentage of the electorate than in November and higher early turnout in Democratic congressional districts in the state. Both are positive signs for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two challengers, easing fears that the typical voter dropoff that has plagued Democrats in past years would doom the party's chances with control of the Senate on the line.

Meanwhile, early-vote turnout has lagged in Republican-held congressional districts, likely leaving GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue with a larger deficit heading into Election Day than they had to make up on Nov. 3, with early voting concluding this week leading up to the New Year's holiday.

Both parties have been closely tracking the in-person and absentee ballots that have already been submitted, looking for data on the state of the races after the extremely close contests in November and with less than a week left to tweak get-out-the-vote and advertising strategies for next Tuesday's vote.

While the early-vote figures provide some comfort to Democrats, they are hardly predictive: Republican officials have always anticipated needing to overperform on Election Day compared with Democrats. GOP voters have long preferred casting ballots in person and on the day of the election, but the partisan differences in voting became even more acute after President Donald Trump spent much of the year criticizing voting by mail and attacking the administration of Georgia’s November election.

At the very least, though, the strong Democratic performance so far puts extra pressure on Republicans to perform on Election Day. The two Republican senators are relying on Trump to juice turnout next week: The president is holding his final rally of the election cycle on Monday night in one of the most Republican-heavy corners of the state, an effort to drive his supporters to the polls in an area where they need to win by huge margins.

Karl Rove, the veteran GOP operative who is heading the joint fundraising committee between Loeffler, Perdue and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote in a memo this week that the votes cast so far favor Democrats more than they did in November, according to a copy of the memo obtained by POLITICO.

“While the combined total number of votes cast so far by absentee mail-in and in-person early voting is a couple points more Democratic than it was in the fall, this is likely to be the result of early voting in the run-off being cut by two days,” Rove wrote in the memo, referencing the fact that early voting sites were closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. “We expect GOP numbers to keep rising this week and forecasts show good weather for Run-Off Day, Jan. 5.”

“President Trump’s visit to Dalton for a rally Monday night Jan. 4 should help drive GOP turnout that Tuesday in a big way,” Rove added.

For Democrats, the simple fact that turnout is so high is already a positive. The party has consistently struggled in runoffs in Georgia thanks to major dropoff from Democratic voters who stayed home after November, a trend that does not appear to be continuing this year.

It’s impossible to draw determinative conclusions from early-vote numbers, and operatives tracking the trends caution against predicting the Jan. 5 results based on voting so far. But the trends point to high turnout and a close election for Democrats even in a state where their Senate candidates underperformed Joe Biden’s narrow victory two months ago.

"Everything that I hear seems pretty good. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this is not what it was like in 2018,” said Chris Huttman, a veteran operative in the state who has been closely tracking the early-vote figures.

Democrats lost two downballot runoffs in 2018 after more of their voters failed to show back up. But that election took place in December and didn’t include the high-profile stakes of these two Senate races, creating entirely different turnout scenarios. Huttman cautioned that while voting so far looked good for Democrats, Election Day remains a huge unknown.

"I can tell you that the light side of the moon looks good, and I don't know what the dark side of the moon is going to look like,” Huttman said. “I know in 2018, I was like, ‘The light side does not look good.’”

Huttman said his analysis showed Democrats on pace to bank about 80 percent of the early vote they received in November, while Republicans were only on pace to bank about two-thirds of their early vote.

In congressional districts controlled by Democrats, the percentage of the general election vote that has voted early is higher than in the congressional districts controlled by Republicans, according to voter data analyzed by GeorgiaVotes.com, which has tracked the early voting tallies throughout the runoff. Republicans are aware of that deficiency but are relying on their turnout operation to drive those voters to the polls next Tuesday.

One Republican operative working on the runoffs, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, said the GOP’s problem for early voting wasn’t a massive surge among Democrats, but the lag in their own areas. With early voting taking place during the holidays, including the two days where locations were closed last week, Republicans hope more of their voters are simply planning to vote on Election Day.

“I feel really good about what we have done down there,” the operative said of their ground game. “We always knew Georgia was going to be close. We know where our deficiencies are. We know what we have to do.”

Democrats have prioritized early and absentee voting to a higher degree than Republicans, and an advantage at this point was expected. Democrats consider it a firewall against GOP performance next week. But the higher share of the Black vote, plus the addition of tens of thousands of new voters who did not vote in November, are positive indicators.

Though Biden won the state narrowly, Perdue outpaced Ossoff by nearly 100,000 votes, and Republicans earned more overall votes than Democrats in the special election for the other Senate seat. To have success in the runoffs, Democrats needed a more favorable electorate, and believe there are indications that it may materialize.

Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, said the vote so far among key Democratic constituencies was a “very good sign” for the party, though he cautioned against over-interpreting the early vote to try to predict the outcome of the runoffs.

“We know they'll win Election Day, but will they have enough to erase this advantage?” Bonier said of Republicans. “It appears to be pretty clear that they'll need to win Election Day by a wider margin than they did in November.”

Perdue and Loeffler on the trail throughout the election have encouraged their base to vote early and continue to do so this week to narrow the gap. So far, the weather forecasts for Tuesday are sunny and pleasant. But that hasn’t stopped the warnings about waiting.

"You never know what the weather is going to be next week. We only have Tuesday next week,” Perdue said on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt’s radio show Monday. “You got to get out and vote before Thursday. We're just telling everybody in the state you can't take a chance not voting."