Georgia's Very Own Megathread! (v2)

[Adam Griffin]

Not crazy about these figures, though more data is needed (specifically, where these votes are coming from). If whites get to 60% or higher in early voting and hold that, it's over.

[Adam Griffin]

It's worth noting that these figures aren't all that pessimistic for a baseline election (aka 2010 & 2014), but when your campaign is built around orchestrating an unprecedented turnout of low-propensity, minority and young voters, this isn't what you want the final EV to look like.

It's also not that bad if you've actually succeeded at persuasion - though that is impossible to know right now.

It's still early, though: probably a decent amount of "Kavanaugh angst" or whatever you'd call it getting the GOP reliables out earlier than usual; we'll know for sure if it starts tapering off in the next few days.

[Adam Griffin]

Yeah, picking out a couple of dozen populated counties, the heavily-GOP counties are essentially all exceeding the statewide overperformance compared to 2014 (Hall and Columbia are the exceptions), and the heavily-Democratic counties are essentially all underperforming (with the exception of Fulton and Clayton). Not good! Let's hope the rubes are just dumping early and it's not a trend.

[Storr]

According to Georgia Votes, an additional 82,344 valid votes were cast yesterday; today's accepted ballot total stands at 211,861 votes: 8.31% of total 2014 turnout.

Today's total exceeded yesterday's, when more than three times the number of votes were cast when compared to the first day of early voting in 2014. Today, that number was roughly four times as many as in 2014.

The white share of the electorate surged once again, with the electorate that voted today being 62% white, 28% black and 10% other. The female share of the electorate fell again, as did the 65+ share (mostly due to 50-64 year-olds voting), with this being the first time that 65+ voters are less than 50% of the electorate. In short, the electorate (again) got whiter, more male and younger (at least when comparing extremes).

Early vote totals are 215% higher than at this point in 2014 (up from 181% yesterday).

Code:

White	121172	57.2% (+3.5)
Black	67141	31.7% (-2.7)
Latino	2853          1.3% (-0.3)
Asian	3083	         1.5%  (-0.3)
Other	17612        8.3%  (-0.1)

Female	112474	53.1% (-0.8)
Male		95314 	45.0% (+0.9)
Unknown	4073	        1.9%   (0.0)

18-29	 10628	5.0%   (-0.4)
30-39	 12268	5.8%   (+0.2)
40-49	 20426	9.6%   (+0.5)
50-64        61410	29.0%  (+1.1)
65+         103243      48.7%  (-1.6)
Unknown	  3886       1.8%   (0.0)

Out of curiosity, do we know what the 'Other' category for race is? For example, is that category mostly people of mixed heritage or mostly just people of one race where their race is not reported, missing, or something similar? 8.3% is a significant chunk of the overall number of votes, so I was wondering if we have any information that can give us insight in to which way many or most of those voters are choosing to lean.

[Rookie Yinzer]

Racist GA hicks flooding to the polls

LOL. My first thought when I saw the uptick in white participation, but I am not pressing the panic button yet. Kemp has been getting raked over the coals the past week, maybe his people are just anxious to get their vote off their chest. Abrams' field program is not letting their foot off the gas and she has enough money along with PACs supporting her to match him pound for pound on television.

[Adam Griffin]

Out of curiosity, do we know what the 'Other' category for race is? For example, is that category mostly people of mixed heritage or mostly just people of one race where their race is not reported, missing, or something similar? 8.3% is a significant chunk of the overall number of votes, so I was wondering if we have any information that can give us insight in to which way many or most of those voters are choosing to lean.

It's disproportionately first-time registrants/voters, for the most part. The form no longer mandates race be required, and in addition to that, some people register using the federal form (which leads to a lack of data along racial lines apparently), which has led to a spike of unknown/other registrants over the past decade.

From there, the "other group" tends to reflect their local communities pretty proportionately, with the exception of areas with meaningful Latino and Asian populations; they always end up being a disproportionate share of the "other" electorate initially (however, they usually do get classified properly in subsequent elections, which is why the figure hasn't really exceeded 10% in the past few elections).

In counties where it's basically 90-95%+ combined white and black, however, you can pretty much distribute the "other" category proportionately along whatever percentages the white and black groups have.

Just spitballing here, but I'd say of the 8% who are "others", 4-5% are white, 2-3% are black and 1% is Latino/Asian. However, we don't inherently reassign them for historical comparisons because the "other" category in past elections has usually been around 10% (which means the white and black shares of the electorate are both actually quite a bit larger than we quote when providing historical turnout data).

[Adam Griffin]

The one good bit of news for Abrams in all the top-lines is this: we're still at 31% of early voters being those who didn't vote at all in 2014. Usually in a midterm, that number ends up being 10-15% (and it may very well still end up there), but for now, that's a relative safeguard against the broader trends we've seen the past couple of days. It would be counter-intuitive to assume that such a surge is coming from GOP-leaning first-time voters.

[Alabama_Indy10]

Racist GA hicks flooding to the polls

LOL. My first thought when I saw the uptick in white participation, but I am not pressing the panic button yet. Kemp has been getting raked over the coals the past week, maybe his people are just anxious to get their vote off their chest. Abrams' field program is not letting their foot off the gas and she has enough money along with PACs supporting her to match him pound for pound on television.

What has Kemp done to be getting raked over the coals? The whole voting situation I'm guessing?

[Adam Griffin]

RIP Glorious Spread

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Yeah, picking out a couple of dozen populated counties, the heavily-GOP counties are essentially all exceeding the statewide overperformance compared to 2014 (Hall and Columbia are the exceptions), and the heavily-Democratic counties are essentially all underperforming (with the exception of Fulton and Clayton). Not good! Let's hope the rubes are just dumping early and it's not a trend.

Yeah, that doesn't sound too good for Abrams. Has Kemp's campaign been focusing on turning out lower propensity Conservative whites at all? If not, then at least on the bright side the ones who are voting are more likely to be people who were going to vote anyway.

The most optimistic way to interpret this for Abrams is that of the 121,172 whites who have voted, the % of whom voted on election day in 2014 is about only 23.4% didn't vote in 2014, whereas among the non-whites who have already voted, significantly higher shares are 2014 non-voters. And in addition, the % of Whites who voted on election day in 2014 is about 1.5 times as much as the % of non-whites who voted on election day in 2014. So that does suggest at least *some* higher degree of cannibalization of the white Election Day vote as compared to the non-white Election Day vote is going on here.

But still, I would really like to see the Black share of early voters at 30%+

[Virginiá]

It seems like (so far) this is going to be a really high turnout midterm in most states, and not just because of Democrats. I think even Virginia Republicans saw a small uptick in turnout in 2017 relative to 2013, it just couldn't match the huge surge of Democrats.

[Adam Griffin]

And of those who have voted thus far, here's the breakdown of how their votes were distributed in 2014 by race. I found it interesting that there's virtually no difference in the white share between people who voted ED & EV in 2014 (though there's a meaningful difference in black share of vote):

Since yesterday, whites have taken the lead in all 3 categories of voters here. While there wasn't much of a shift in the category of who voted early in 2014 (from whites up by 30 yesterday, to 31 today), there does appear to be some big movement in terms of who has voted early in 2018 that voted on Election Day 4 years ago (whites were up 34 points yesterday; 39 points today) and among 2014 non-voters as well (blacks were up 3 points yesterday; whites up 8 points today).

Just to make sure we're clear, these percentages above/below are for all votes cast (and not a single day).



There may be some cannibalization, but there are also a lot of first-time whites coming out as well: in raw numbers, enough to cancel out the gains in this category by the rest and then some.

[Adam Griffin]

Also, here are some reference points: I went back through my posts in 2014 to find the racial updates I posted for EV during that time. They'll be helpful for comparison in a few days:

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

There may be some cannibalization, but there are also a lot of first-time whites coming out as well: in raw numbers, enough to cancel out the gains in this category by the rest and then some.

Can you be more specific about which gains you are referring to in the bolded/underlined part above?

[Rookie Yinzer]

There may be some cannibalization, but there are also a lot of first-time whites coming out as well: in raw numbers, enough to cancel out the gains in this category by the rest and then some.

Can you be more specific about which gains you are referring to in the bolded/underlined part above?

For now, the amount of non-2014 white voters is enough to cancel out the massive gains from non-white voters who did not vote in 2014.

Hoping it is either cannibilization or that these non-2014 white voters skew more Abrams (even if Kemp is winning them decisively) than the white electorate will as a whole.

[IceSpear]

Racist GA hicks flooding to the polls

Yeah...I'll believe the Racist GA Hicks lose when I see it. The thought of a black woman becoming governor is going to energize them to unimaginable levels.

[Adam Griffin]

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Meh, just a recommendation, but if you're the party that oh so often associates members of the LGBT community with perverts and pedophiles - and then want to ask for their votes - perhaps your line of attack shouldn't remind them of that.

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/ben_brasch/status/1052571889762295810

[QAnonKelly]

Just voted with my brother. I voted completely straight ticket (he said he pretty much did). We were in and out in about ten minutes.

[Dr. Arch]

Just voted with my brother. I voted completely straight ticket he said he pretty much did). We were in and out in about ten minutes.

FFs

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

There may be some cannibalization, but there are also a lot of first-time whites coming out as well: in raw numbers, enough to cancel out the gains in this category by the rest and then some.

Can you be more specific about which gains you are referring to in the bolded/underlined part above?

For now, the amount of non-2014 white voters is enough to cancel out the massive gains from non-white voters who did not vote in 2014.

There are 28,345 white voters who didn't vote at all in 2014 and 23,066 black voters who didn't vote at all in 2014. Suppose Whites are voting for Kemp 75-25 and African Americans are voting for Abrams 90-10 (it is really probably more like 95-5, but suppose 90-10).

That gives you 7086 white voters for Abrams and 21259 white voters for Kemp. And it gives you 20759 black voters for Abrams and 2307 for Kemp. In total, that is 27846 for Abrams, and 23565 for Kemp.

So among people who didn't vote at all in 2014 but have already voted in 2018, the African American Dem votes should be more than canceling out the White Rep votes. Then the other non-whites are just gravy on top of that for Abrams.

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I would think that is the case, at least to some degree, simply because non-2014 voters are more likely to be new registrants, and therefore to be younger. So, the whites who have already voted but didn't vote in 2014 are probably something more like 30%-35% Abrams (or maybe even a little bit more) than 25% Abrams.

So, under an optimistic but - I don't think - unrealistic scenario for Abrams, the 2014 non-voters are splitting something like this:

White: 35% Abrams, 65% Kemp
Black: 95% Abrams, 5% Kemp
Hispanic: 80% Abrams, 20% Kemp
Asian: 80% Abrams, 20% Kemp
Other: 50% Abrams, 50% Kemp

Overall, that gets you to 40,168 votes for Abrams (61.1%) and 25,531 votes for Kemp (38.9%).

That is a vote margin of 14,367. The total Republican vote margin in the 2014 Governors race was as 200,443, so that is 7.3% of the way to eliminating that margin (of course, Abrams really wants 50%+, not just to eliminate the margin).

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

Also, here are some reference points: I went back through my posts in 2014 to find the racial updates I posted for EV during that time. They'll be helpful for comparison in a few days:

OK, that is comforting, and that makes the 28% Black share yesterday look a lot better than it did. Hopefully that means that the African American vote share will go up this time as well as the early voting period goes on.

[TheRocketRaccoon]

There's some GOP pollster spin on the EV numbers here. Any thoughts?

https://politics.myajc.com/blog/politics/the-jolt-paper-brian-kemp-doesn-know-how-brother-law-makes-living/VWYc8uEIiPDkq5EjzdQn4L/

[nolesfan2011]

There's some GOP pollster spin on the EV numbers here. Any thoughts?

https://politics.myajc.com/blog/politics/the-jolt-paper-brian-kemp-doesn-know-how-brother-law-makes-living/VWYc8uEIiPDkq5EjzdQn4L/

I'd say the EV data matches the polling relatively well, it's close but a slight GOP edge. Dems have conditioned themselves to think early voting is somehow amazing for them but there are actually plenty of good data points for the GOP to take from the numbers so far.

That said we'll have to wait until the weekend to see because a lot of lower income and working people/younger people can't vote until then

[libertpaulian]

Congrats Governor Brian Kemp?

https://www.allongeorgia.com/georgia-state-politics/abrams-at-georgia-southern-people-shouldnt-have-to-go-into-agriculture-to-make-a-living/?fbclid=IwAR1vu3bVLq1BNP-vCQ_PZin0_3DMcg9ovKiJ2CC9v7Pk-W4GeGWWwiIPu_c

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Seriously, what a stupid-ass move for her to make.  That would be like if Joe Donnelly said "Hoosiers shouldn't have to husk corn or make RVs for a living."