Georgia is going into its last week of early voting with heavy numbers. Log on to the website http://georgiavotes.com/ to view the record early statewide vote totals.
Last week InsiderAdvantage reported the heavy “rural vote” was trending toward Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp. As of last Friday, that pattern remains the same: It is 29 percent black and 60 percent white so far in the composition of the early voters. We’re now over a million voters– probably a third of the total eventual turnout, which may be around 3 million. By comparison, it was between 2.5 and 2.6 million in 2014.
So, for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to get overall turnout up to 32 percent black (probably the minimum she would need to win outright, if not 33 percent), the remaining two-thirds of voters would have to be about 33-34 percent black. Analysts we’ve talked with say it is hard to see how that could happen. Abrams can’t win at 29 percent black vote of total turnout, given that former President Barack Obama could not win Georgia at 30 percent both times he was on the ballot. It is interesting that in Democrat-dominated Fulton County– Georgia’s biggest county– more whites than blacks have voted so far even though blacks outnumber whites in terms of registered voters. (There is no majority race among Fulton voters— low 40s black, upper 30s white, remainder Asians, Hispanics and others.)
The two major parties are really going to have to energize their bases for turnout this week in order for one gubernatorial candidate to secure over 50 percent of the vote. It’s also hard to say how much traction Libertarian third party gubernatorial candidate Ted Metz can generate. He’s around 1 to 2 percent in recent polling.
