GEORGIA UPDATE 12/29 (TOTAL + VBM + IN-PERSON)

Total Votes: 2,566,332 (+228,855)

Percent of registered voters: 33.2%
White: 55.4% (56.5% in general)
Black: 31.3% (27.7% general)
Hispanic: 2.2% (2.6% general)
Asian: 2.5% (2.6% general)

COUNTY TURNOUT RATES (shown as % of registered voters):

State Average: 33.2%
DeKalb: 39.5%
Cobb: 34%
Fulton: 38.2%
Gwinnett: 35.7%
Chatham: 23.4%
Muscogee: 31.4%
Columbia: 33.5%
Houston: 33.6%
Baldwin: 31.7%
Fayette: 41.4%
Hall: 30.1%
Clayton: 31.2%
Forsyth: 39.8%

IN-PERSON EARLY VOTES

Total Votes: 1,710,566 (+175,379)
Percent of registered voters: 22.1%
White: 56% (58.2% in general)
Black: 31% (26.4% general)
Hispanic: 2.2% (2.6% general)
Asian: 2% (2.0% general)

COUNTY TURNOUT RATES (shown as % of registered voters):

State Average: 22.1%
DeKalb: 25.1%
Cobb: 16.1%
Fulton: 28.1%
Gwinnett: 22.6%
Chatham: 14%
Muscogee: 21.3%
Columbia: 23.5%
Houston: 20.4%
Baldwin: 20.9%
Fayette: 30.4%
Hall: 19.9%
Clayton: 20.8%
Forsyth: 29.5%

VBM DATA

Accepted Votes: 855,766 (+53,476)
White: 54.2% (53% general)
Black: 31.8% (30.3% general)
Return Rate: 62.7%

Requested Votes: 1,365,831 (+6,754)
Request Rate: 17.6%
White: 51.5% (51.2% general)
Black: 32.8% (31.4% general)
66+: 45.8% (40.7% general)

Make no mistake, yesterday was the best day for the GOP in a long, long time. They saw turnout increase in Hall, Paulding, Cherokee and several other areas, while counties like Fayette continued their turnout charge.

Their exurban turnout is beginning to jump at last, with Cherokee and Hall finally seeing some good days. We estimate the GOP won yesterday’s in-person EV by 54-46.

I still see no evidence they’ve solved their rural problem, though, and that’s what they’re going to look to fix. Counties like Haralson in the north of the state once again had somewhat disappointing days. No surprise that Trump's rally is scheduled there.

On the Democratic side, Fulton and Cobb saw okay days yesterday, even if DeKalb was a touch below what they would have liked. Muscogee and Chatham *finally* had decent drops (even if there was a lot of mail), and Clayton had a solid drop.

This helped them somewhat counter the GOP exurban surge and kept the Black turnout rate at 31.3% overall, which is great news for them.

However, turnout in Chatham is still lagging, even if a lot of it has to do with a VBM backlog, and there are a lot of untapped votes there still. This is a problem they are aware of, as shown by the fact that Kamala Harris is planning a rally there soon.

The Asian share is now near-identical to November's pre-eday one, and the Hispanic share is ticking up; though I don’t expect it to match November’s share, I expect we’ll end at 2.3% compared to November’s.

Again, the electorate is also becoming far more Black (likely 31% Black in the EV compared to 27.7 in Nov), and more suburban (better white numbers for Democrats).

This was still a *net Democratic day* by about 4.5K votes, which is really strange when you consider that the GOP won the early vote today roughly 54-46 — however, this is really because of mail backlogs in blue counties finally beginning to be cleared.

Our estimate is 150K VBM votes left to get us to around 1M VBM votes in total. I would not be surprised if these were slightly more blue than the current VBM ratio of 64-36 — a quick rate correction, as done in the county model, suggests we should be expecting more D VBM ballots.

The precinct model has dipped to Ossoff +2.2. I expect it to dip to maybe Ossoff +1.6 after Thursday before rebounding to be Ossoff +2 or so in our final forecast. So let’s talk about what this means for the GOP.

I’ve seen arguments that GOP voters are going to make election day skew far more R than it was in November (61-39). I don’t find this argument particularly convincing — per Georgia Votes, only 3.1% of voters who voted early voted on election day in November…

Secondly, as @politicalkiwi has shown…heavy advanced Democratic vote doesn’t necessarily mean an election day drop-off https://twitter.com/PoliticalKiwi/status/1344409693653848065.

Democrats are not really cannibalizing their EV.

I’ve seen the @WinWithJMC Poll of Ossoff +7, Warnock +9. It’s n=500, so there’s a fair bit of noise, and the election day vote will likely not be only 7%. But what does election day really mean? We saw about 19% of the vote come on e-day in Nov. Let’s walk through a scenario now.

The following is a high-turnout scenario that makes a few R-friendly assumptions for the sake of argument. But it is a very possible scenario and thus one worth studying.

Assuming we get about 420K more in-person early votes today and tomorrow (more R by about 54-46) and about 150,000 more mail votes left (more D) from blue areas…we get 740K votes expected on election day with the 19% ratio, with a projected (precinct model) final margin of D+1.7

To break even with that turnout, they need a margin of roughly 65-35 on election day, and I’ve already explained why I don’t find it especially likely that Democratic turnout craters from the 61.6-38.4 November margins calculated by @JMilesColeman and @NilesGAPol.

If they hold November margins on election day, they will need 965K votes in November, which is…almost the turnout of the general election and a significantly higher share of statewide vote (~23.5%).

If we split the difference and give them a 63.4-37.6 margin on election day, they need nearly 850K votes, which is a 15% spike in election day statewide vote share.

If election day isn’t even at 19% of statewide vote or if their election day margins dip from November, then their chances of getting these seats look extraordinarily dim and will require something kind of ridiculous to make up the difference.

That last bit is why the JMC poll showed Ossoff/Warnock leading by so much. And if it’s close to true, that’s horrible for Rs. They need to at least match November in turnout relative to the early vote and exceed the margins too.

Understand, once again, that these are all actually plausible scenarios. *Nobody* is saying these seats are safe D. The GOP could have a great week here and then a great election day and they could win it. Do not dismiss this possibility!

But with a 31% Black electorate headed into election day, low rural turnout in the north, and spiking suburban turnout, I would prefer to be the Democrats right now.

Today was a good day for Republicans, no doubt. But think in terms of margins -- if Democrats continue to pad their lead with net Dem days, then it means that the GOP has a hurdle of anywhere between 200-250K votes to clear on election day. That's huge. And it's why I'm at Lean D

special thanks to @ADincgor, @joe__gantt, @thunderousprof, @EconWanabe, and @dooraven for their help with all of this, from the models that Ali and I made to the data analysis.

And thank you to @ElectProject for the data reported here.