by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

October 21, 2024

As of Sunday evening, more than 1.4 million Georgians already voted in the Nov. 5 general election topped by the presidential contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. That amounts to more than a quarter of the entire turnout for the 2020 race, with nearly two weeks of early voting and Election Day still ahead.

High turnout the first week is no surprise, said Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie. Georgia voters tell pollsters they appreciate the flexibility of early voting.

“It is also a function of the fact that this is a base election, and most voters have made their minds up already,” Gillespie said. “They don’t need to watch another interview, they don’t need to see another debate, which isn’t going to happen at this point. They don’t need any more information to make up their minds.”

According to data on the Secretary of State’s website, just over 59% of those who have voted so far are white, while about 27.7% are Black. Women are outpacing men at the ballot box by about 10%, around 55% to 45%.

The state’s most populous counties of Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett have delivered the most raw votes – those four counties alone out of Georgia’s 159 counties account for just under a third of the ballots accepted so far. At the same time, smaller counties lead at per capita turnout – Towns County in north Georgia, with a population of about 13,000, leads the state with a turnout rate of more than 32%.

While pundits may try to read the tea leaves of early voting demographics, the early results can’t predict who will win Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.

“At this point, the electorate looks a lot like, at least in terms of ethnicity and race, what we had in 2020 and 2022,” he said.

“If indeed the electorate looks like it did four years ago or even two years ago, and it votes the way that a similar electorate did, then all we can say is it’s going to be close, and that confirms with the polling shows,” he added.

While the early vote statistics may not give us any insight into who will be picking out the drapes in the Oval Office this time in January, the parties will be poring over the Georgia data to figure out where to send surrogates in the final weeks of the election.

“There’s going to be some variability in early voting, but if they start to see certain types of red flags, for instance, a reliably Democratic or a reliably Republican county where you’ve got low levels of early voting, that is a clue to the respective campaigns to try to go there and make sure that you’re knocking on doors and making phone calls to drive up turnout in those areas,” Gillespie said.

Republicans may be facing a unique challenge to getting out their early vote, an electorate that is used to being told by the nominee to show up on Election Day.

Though he has since moderated his views, Trump previously suggested that early or absentee votes were somehow easier for nefarious forces to steal. Four years of investigations haven’t turned up any evidence of widespread vote theft in 2020.

“That was the message that Trump put out for several years, and did it so loudly that his true believers are having a hard time,” Bullock said. “Now the message is essentially we want to get those votes essentially in the bank, not wait until Election Day where your schedule may go to hell and you can’t make it to the polls.”

Banking early votes also allows the parties to focus their turnout efforts on lower-propensity voters who would not otherwise show up, Gillespie said.

“The big question is, for Republican voters, which message prevails, whether or not people change their behavior as a result of the new Trump rhetoric on early voting and whether or not their mobilization efforts to encourage Republican voters to vote early so that they could focus on lower propensity voters actually work,” she said.

Some of the state’s highest-profile Trump backers, including former Sen. Kelly Loeffler and state Republican Party chair Josh McKoon, invited news cameras along as they cast their ballots on Wednesday in an attempt to demonstrate that early voting is secure.

“This year, when Georgians bank their votes for President Trump, they can have confidence not only in our new election laws, but in the army of poll watchers and attorneys who are on the ground making sure every vote counts,” Loeffler said. “The No. 1 way you can help Donald Trump win Georgia is by swamping the vote during early voting. Make your voice heard, because it will count.”

On Sunday, Harris spoke at two churches in metro Atlanta, including at a mega church in Stonecrest, as part of a souls to the polls push, which is a tradition in Black churches to get out the vote by turning out congregants after Sunday services.

Sunday also happened to be Harris’ 60th birthday, and she was serenaded at both events Sunday, including by Stevie Wonder.

Harris also rallied supporters to vote early at a spirited event in Atlanta on Saturday where she got an on-stage boost from R&B star and Atlanta native Usher.

“You know Georgia’s own president Jimmy Carter voted early. Bless him. Just days after his 100th birthday. So, look, if Jimmy Carter can vote early, you can too,” Harris said.

The early success of advanced voting suggests that Georgians want to take advantage of it, Gillespie said.

“The idea that a fifth of Georgia’s electorate maybe has already cast ballots in the first week, I think is something that’s notable,” she said. “If you keep seeing voting at these high levels, I think that this is just a signal of how much Georgia voters like early voting. So despite the people who complain that voting should only be on one day, the market has spoken, people want the convenience of being able to cast their ballots across a multi-day period.”

Deputy Editor Jill Nolin contributed to this report.

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