Georgia surpassed one million early voters on Friday — as the key swing state has been shattering previous records — but a surge in rural turnout could indicate that early voting may not be quite as beneficial to Democrats as they would hope. Early turnout in a dozen rural counties has greatly exceeded turnout at the same stage in the 2020 election, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, while voting in deep-blue pockets lags behind. Georgia, which was lost narrowly by President Trump in 2020 and is one of the most closely watched battleground states ahead of Election Day, currently has Trump 1.1 percent ahead of Vice President Harris, RealClear’s polling averages indicate. The state is evenly divided between metro Atlanta, which is deep blue, and the largely rural remainder of the state, which is deep red. Heavy voter turnout from blue counties, some of which was inspired by the get-out-the-vote efforts of a former state representative and anti-Trump activist, Stacey Abrams, contributed to the surprise Democratic wins in 2018 and 2020. Yet Ms. Abrams was trounced in her 2022 rematch with Governor Kemp and has had a lower profile this election cycle.Ms. Abrams did make a video urging Georgia residents to vote early, saying it’s the “best way to bank your vote and make sure nothing interferes.” The video was shared by an X account, Kamala for Georgia, which said there was “too much at stake” and that “you don’t want to wait until Election Day.” On Tuesday, the first day of in-person early voting in the state, turnout smashed previous records for first-day early voting, the chief operating officer for Georgia’s secretary of state, Gabriel Sterling, wrote on X. More than 328,000 votes were cast that day, he said, more than double the number of the previous first-day record in 2020 of 136,000 votes. As of Friday afternoon, 1,059,550 absentee and early in-person ballots had been accepted in the state. The first reports earlier this week of the surge in turnout caused jubilation among Democrats, some of whom had been otherwise discouraged that Ms. Harris had lost her momentum. New data must be giving them pause, though. Several rural counties are leading the way for turnout percentage-wise, including rural Towns County, where more than one in four active voters have cast their ballots. What’s not clear is who these rural early voters are. These counties vote overwhelmingly Republican in toto, but also have minority populations of as much as 30 percent.Yet while experts tend to be skeptical about reading too much into the early figures, there are certainly signs that while the early voting surge could benefit Ms. Harris overall, Republicans are making major gains in early voting.More women have cast their ballots early than men — making up 54.8 percent of the early vote compared to men’s 45 percent, the state’s data indicate, boding well for Ms. Harris, who leads among female voters in both state and national polling. Yet large swaths of early voters are in the 50-and-older age brackets and rural turnout is surging, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted, indicating that Republicans’ recent efforts to embrace early voting may be seeing some success. A preliminary review by the firm of a Republican consultant, Mark Rountree, shows that 46 percent of “early voters so far tend to vote in GOP primaries — a double-digit increase from the same period in the 2020 election,” the outlet reported. “At minimum, it shows that Republicans are significantly more energized to vote early than in past campaigns,” Mr. Rountree said. “Whatever Republicans are overall doing seems to be working so far.”In North Carolina, another swing state, early voting got off to a strong start this week despite the devastation there from Hurricane Helene. More than 400 early-voting sites opened as planned, the Associated Press reported, including nearly all of the sites in the counties that were damaged the most by the hurricane. These western, rural counties are overwhelmingly white and reliably Republican.This year, Republicans have been dumping millions of dollars into pushing the early vote, marking a change for a party that has tended to be skeptical or critical of voting before Election Day. Trump’s public negativity about early voting in 2020 is believed to have contributed to his defeat. While Trump has given mixed messaging about early voting, calling it “stupid” and “corrupt” at times, he has recently been making major efforts to get out the early vote, especially in battleground states. One Republican initiative, “Swamp the Vote,” says that “the only way to ensure that is by beating the far left liberals at their own game – by voting before Election Day.” Trump, in a video statement for the voting initiative, said that while he plans to “secure our elections” by restoring paper ballots, same day-voting, and voter ID, “until then, Republicans must win” through “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats.” “There’s no way that we can give somebody else 50 days to get their vote out and hope to overcome that in 13 hours, and I think some of the races that we’ve had since 2020 have brought that home,” the chairman of the GOP at Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Sam DeMarco, said, per the Hill. The Sun has reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns for comment.
