FHQ obviously didn't update the Georgia Senate runoff early voting numbers over the weekend, but there wasn't anything to update anyway. The Elections Division over at SOS didn't add in the Friday and weekend numbers until this morning. I should note that most of the changes below are from Friday. The only early voting conducted over the weekend was in Sumter County on Saturday while the rest of the state shut down their early voting operations after Friday. Things will pick back up today and be augmented by the start of advance voting* before everything comes to a close -- because of Thanksgiving -- at the end of the day on Wednesday. And if the reporting by the Secretary of State at the end of early voting ahead of the general election and the halt over this past weekend are any indication, we likely won't get the Wednesday statistics until next Monday. But we'll have updates tomorrow morning and on Wednesday to account for the changes from today and Tuesday.
And what is the newly added data telling us? Not much more than we already knew actually. With the exception of last Tuesday, the African American proportion of early voters has consistently hovered around 22%; well below the mark that demographic group acheived during the early voting period before the general election. The most likely, though probably not the only, reason that the black proportion of early voters broke 24% on last Tuesday was that that was day that early voting began in Fulton County. We also have continued to see the gender balance of early voters shift toward women. Women now make up nearly 51% of all early voters. That too is down from the 56% of early voters that women made up during the general eleciton. And as we've been saying, the fact that both groups are below the points they were at before November 4 does not bode well for Jim Martin.
That, however, is not the whole story. We have already examined the potential impact the staggered start to early voting might have, but one additional factor we can look at is how the early vote breaks down on the county level. We can combine the latter with the former to get a much clearer picture of the influence early voting may have on the tally on December 2. I'm working with some of that data now. Hopefully I'll be able to put something informative together.
*Advance voting is conducted during the business week before election day. It basically continues the early voting process but opens up more polling locations to increase the ease of voting during that final week.
Recent Posts:
Georgia Senate Runoff: Early Voting (Day 4)
Georgia Senate Runoff: Early Voting (Day 3)
Georgia Senate Runoff: Early Voting (Day 2)
Taegan Goddard posted a couple of polls of GA-sen. Are these the first polls to be released for the runoff? I know that SurveyUSA did some runoff-related polling, but they didn't poll the runoff election itself.
ReplyDeleteNice additions, Jack. There hasn't been much polling on the runoff, but Pollster has five polls for the race thus far with a Pollster margin of 4.5 points.
ReplyDeleteLet's dust off the FHQ graduated weighted average and apply it to these polls (minus the Mellman/DSCC poll).
Oh, I'll put this into its own post. Hold on.