Wednesday, November 19, 2008
News Georgia Early Voting Day 1: African-American participation is down
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 3:36 PM
Josh Putnam at Frontloading HQ crunches Monday's early voting results. After he listed the raw numbers, here's what he found:
* Turnout is down, but that's not a surprise. Barely 13,000 votes cast is a fraction of what we were seeing early on in the general election early voting. [I'm still trying to get a hold of the day-by-day data on this in order to draw a proper comparison.]* The percentage of African American participation is down. This isn't a fair comparison, but over the entire early voting period for the general election, blacks made up nearly 35% of early voters (via Michael McDonald). For that proportion to sink to 22% is not good news for Jim Martin.
* The female percentage of the early vote is also down; another possible omen for Martin. Again, according to McDonald, women made up over 56% of early voters prior to the November 4 election. That proportion is now down to just under 48%.
Granted, Putnam says, some counties with large African-American populations — like Fulton County — don't start early voting until today. Top five counties in terms of turnout were DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, Hall and Forsyth.
He also says that the length of early voting periods could play into Chambliss' favor. Look again at the counties where you saw the greatest turnout — three of those are pretty scarlet.
And some more tidbits:
The complicating factor is that a county like Fulton will only have the final three business days of this week and the first three business days of next week -- truncated due to the Thanksgiving holiday -- for early voting. And those advance voting-only counties will only have the three days next week. Again, if those are predominantly Martin counties, then the challenger may be getting the short end of the stick. And to think, there was all this fuss over the Republicans having lengthened the time between the general election and the runoff when they reinstituted the 50% rule for the runoff. The talk over the last week or so here in Georgia was that the extra week would give enthusiastic Democrats even more time to vote. Well, not if they can't. So, the 50% rule hurt Chambliss, but the time between the general and the runoff may not.
Great work by Putnam. Give his site a visit — he's got more info there for you about the results.
Comments (1)
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So much for the so called shift left. Obama's election didn't signal a shift left in the American political landscape. His election and the accompanying turnout had to do with him and the historic nature of electing the first black man to the Presidency. That can't be very encouraging left leaning folks at all. Look for a reversal of republican fortunes at the mid-term. 1994 redux.
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