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In Georgia GOP Districts Dominate Early Voting
In January of 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris denounced Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law as part of a vast GOP conspiracy to make it difficult to vote: “I have met with voters in Georgia. I have heard your outrage about the anti-voter law here.”
No amount of demagoguery … will distract the voters from the direction in which the country is headed under the Biden-Harris regime.
This was robotically reported by the corporate media, of course, but the “anti-voter” claim was soundly refuted by early voters in the Peach State last week. In addition to the record-shattering first day turnout (313,383), Saturday’s turnout (162,966) was the largest ever in a general election. The number of ballots cast during the first five days of early voting totaled 1,377,371, according to data provided by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
These robust turnout numbers were no shock to anyone familiar with the 2021 statute, but there was one major surprise. As the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports, “Already, early voting turnout in about a dozen rural Georgia counties has far surpassed totals for this point in the 2020 election.
By contrast, early voting rates in deep-blue metro Atlanta counties is lagging behind where it was at that stage in the campaign.” Historically, rural Republicans have eschewed early voting, and waited for Election Day to cast their ballots. But this year GOP leaders — including former President Trump — have encouraged Republicans to “make a plan to vote” and do it early. And, as the following suggests, it’s working in Georgia.
How 2024 Early Voters Voted in 2020
District
PVI
Voted Early 2020
Voted ED 2020
Didn’t Vote 2020
GA-1
R+9
73,423
6,263
17,729
GA-3
R+18
87,923
8,388
16,823
GA-6
R+11
88,770
3,147
16,279
GA-8
R+16
74,217
6,858
13,451
GA-9
R+22
83,339
5,918
18,076
GA-10
R+15
84,667
6,184
15,129
GA-11
R+11
65,133
5,179
14,699
GA-12
R+8
76,610
6,460
9,439
GA-14
R+22
75,106
4,602
14,637
Total
709,188
52,999
136,262
Georgia has 14 congressional districts. This table lists the nine in which Republicans dominate. The “PVI” column indicates the partisan lean of each according to the Cook Political Report. The next column shows the 2024 early voters who also voted early in 2020. The following column indicates the number of 2024 early voters who cast their ballots on Election Day in 2020. The last column on the right shows the 2024 early voters who did not bother to vote in 2020. The number of voters who cast ballots in these districts during the first week of early voting totaled 898,449 — 65 percent of all ballots cast. The most important number on the table is at the foot of the last column. It represents the crucial low propensity voters.
Georgia’s Low Propensity Voters
Low propensity voters, as the label suggests, have little in common with the readers of this column. They don’t follow politics closely, their knowledge of specific candidates tends to be superficial, and they certainly don’t pore over election polls.
Very few of them could tell you what Nate Silver or Allan Lichtman do for a living. That does not, however, mean that they never vote. They are much more likely to vote in presidential elections than in midterm congressional contests and, as the above table suggests, they can be motivated by circumstances and candidates. It is all but certain that these voters played a crucial role in Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton. As Philip Bump suggested in the Washington Post:
One of the factors that drove Trump’s success in 2016 was that he managed to motivate low-frequency voters — largely Whites without college educations — to come out and support his candidacy. The Equis data suggest that he did something similar in 2020, spurring much more enthusiasm for voting among conservative Latinos, including both conservative Republicans (about 14 percent of the Latino voting population) and conservative Democrats (11 percent).
Those groups were not only more motivated to vote but also became more approving of Trump’s presidency from 2019 to 2020 (though only modestly in the case of those Democrats).
Considering that fully 15 percent of the people who cast ballots last week in Georgia’s red districts were low propensity voters — about twice as many as voted in blue districts — it’s a good bet they will play a major role in deciding who wins the state. Nor is it difficult to divine what has motivated them to get off their posteriors and exercise the franchise.
Many of these people are asking themselves, “Am I better off now than I was four years ago?” The answer to that question is just as clear as it was when Ronald Reagan asked it in 1980 during his debate with the feckless Democrat he was running against. The obvious answer is, of course, “Hell no!” This is why Georgia’s Republican districts are dominating early voting.
It’s probable that similar dynamics are at work in Pennsylvania. This is why Kamala Harris’s poll numbers are heading southward nationally and in the battle ground states. She is right when she says it’s time to “turn the page” politically. No amount of demagoguery about voter suppression in Georgia will distract the voters from the direction in which the country is headed under the Biden-Harris regime. Early voting in the Peach State suggests that it is indeed time for a new chapter in which Kamala Harris is written out of the plot.
READ MORE from David Catron:
How Democrat Lawfare Launched Trump’s Comeback
Kamala Harris Is Melting
The post In Georgia GOP Districts Dominate Early Voting appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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