In Georgia GOP Districts Dominate Early Voting

In January of 2022, Kamala Harris denounced Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law as part of a 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.”

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 reported, “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 in the Peach State have eschewed early voting, preferring to wait for Election Day to cast their presidential ballots. But this year GOP leaders — including former President Trump — have encouraged Republicans to “make a plan to vote” and to follow through early. And, as the table below suggests, it’s working in Georgia.

                                                                       How 2024 Early Voters Voted in 2020

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 “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 pre-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 writes 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 North Carolina, Pennsylvania and the other key swing states. 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,” but no amount of demagoguery about voter suppression in Georgia will distract the public from the direction in which the country is headed under the Biden-Harris administration. Early voting in the Peach State suggests that it is indeed time for a fresh new chapter in the nation’s ongoing political saga—one 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.