Early voting numbers don’t match what you’ve seen on TV

Before there’s much else to say about the results of Tuesday’s election, we can say that, perhaps to a surprising degree, people have been paying attention. We can draw that conclusion from the record early voting numbers, which topped a million for the first time.

Was it the endless ads that portrayed the race as a mud fight or a wildly off-target bird hunt that drove turnout more than 17 percent higher than the previous record set in 2022? Apparently not.

The most jarring discrepancy in this year’s election is between the amount each party spent on television ads and the number of people who have pulled each party’s ballot.

Particularly because of their heated gubernatorial primary, but also because they have down-ballot candidates with the money to spend early on ads, Republicans clearly won the battle of the airwaves. But in a head-spinning reversal, Democratic turnout topped Republicans by 15 percent, roughly the same percentage lead Republicans had over Democrats in 2022.

A decade of Donald Trump has left Republicans less inclined toward early voting than Democrats, which might account for some of the differences. But Gov. Brian Kemp had good reason to say last week he was “definitely concerned” about the difference in early turnout in the two parties’ primaries.

The Secretary of State’s website has a cool “Election Data Hub”  with an interactive map that shows each county’s turnout by party, race/ethnicity and gender. It’s a very clear window into what the governor was talking about. The huge margin for Democrats in Fulton County — 95,096 people voted in the Democratic primary compared to 26,106 in the Republican primary — isn’t good news for the GOP.

But even more concerning, perhaps, are the numbers from several of the big metro counties, starting with Cobb and Gwinnett, which we’ve been speaking of for years as moving toward the Democrats. Democrats doubled or tripled the Republican turnout in most of these counties, which sounds like they’ve moved.

Still, this is Georgia, where the outcome of one election is no solid predictor of the next.

If it isn’t all the money that got poured into television, which has raised interest in this race, what has? Obviously, Democrats are enjoying a big midterm wave all over the country, and if the early voting numbers in Georgia are any indication, it’s going to be huge. Could there be other reasons, closer to the ground?

It would be interesting to know whether any Republican voters, after listening to their candidates espouse various income and property tax-cutting proposals, decided they liked Michael Thurmond’s proposal to halve the sales tax and switched primaries. It’s a shame, anyway, that all the proposals never got to be debated on the same stage.

For the survivors of this round, there are now two important dates to keep in mind: the runoff election on June 16, and the special session to figure out how to hold this year’s general election and draw a new map for 2028, which begins the following day on June 17. With a hold on fundraising while it lasts, this special session may set a record for election-year tension.