JAMES Magazine Online: An Early Look at Georgia’s Early Vote Numbers

Phil Kent

Friday, October 18th, 2024

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As we reported yesterday, Georgia’s early vote totals set a record. Today’s analysis posts some good numbers for Republicans. Click on the website http://georgiavotes.com/ which reports that so far in the 2024 general election, 328,805 people have voted. At this point in the 2020 general election, that number was 1,005,872 and total turnout for the 2024 general election is 67% lower. The voting method breakdown is 22,916 mail ballots and 305,889 early votes. 

Audrey Haynes, an associate political science professor at the University of Georgia, says these record-breaking numbers suggest that Republicans have bought into early voting and mobilized GOP voters to vote by mail or by absentee ballots. 

Polling released two days ago by InsiderAdvantage (James Magazine’s sister company) show former GOP President Donald Trump leading and rising by 2 points from a tie recorded a week ago. Trump has a 1-point lead in Georgia over Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris according to FiveThirtyEight’s survey, while RealClearPolitics also shows Trump with a 1-point ahead of Harris. (All results are within the margin of error.) 

Consider some results from the first day of voting on Tuesday: 

Out of Georgia’s 10 top Congressional Districts, early voting in person totals show the top 7 were GOP Districts. Only 3 were Democrat controlled districts. 

District 1 – 22,246   GOP
District 2 – 19,994   DEM
District 3 – 23,717    GOP
District 5 – 23,424  DEM
District 6 – 27,108    DEM
District 7 –  29,081  GOP
District 8 –  20,751   GOP
District 9 –  23,228  GOP
District 10 – 22,972 GOP
District 14 – 20,776 GOP

Mail in Absentee votes overall also find 8 of the top 10 districts also trend toward Republicans. 

District 1 – 2,219  GOP
District 2 –  1,474  DEM
District 3 –  3,277 GOP
District 5 –  1,156  DEM
District 7 –   2,263 GOP
District 8 –  1,373  GOP
District 9 –  2,014 GOP
District 10 – 2,376 GOP
District 12 – 2,208 GOP
District 14 – 1,353 GOP

Fulton County, the state’s most populous county, naturally cast the highest number of votes on Tuesday, with over 43,000 ballots. The county as a whole is carried by Democrats, but north Fulton generates a sizeable Republican vote which helps the statewide GOP total. Cobb County cast more than 29,600 ballots, and while it leans Democrat it is still a big GOP vote generator. Democrat-dominated DeKalb County had some 27,000 votes and Gwinnett County had nearly 21,800 votes. 

Those four counties, which President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 election, made up nearly a third of the ballots cast on Tuesday. Of those Biden saw the smallest margin of victory in Cobb County, which he carried with 56 percent of the vote.