More than 1 million Georgia voters have already cast ballots as the state remains a focus of one of the closest presidential contests in recent memory.
Today is just the third day of early in person voting and it's already at ~20% of the entire 2020 vote (both early and on election day)
C'mon america,.dont be the guy who says 'oh, a million already? I can sit this one out, then' and then watch the orange turd get his second term and pardon himself with the help of his SC buddies.
I had to wait an hour to vote today in my area with a relatively small population (NW area of GA). That's never happened before, at least not with early voting.
I assume you are in the Dalton area? Maybe Trenton? No need to answer, it's just interesting to see a fellow lemmyite from the same general region. I'm in the Chattanooga area and have heard similar things. These wait times seem odd this early, but I'm really happy it seems early voting turnout seems to be exceptionally healthy so far.
Do we have any idea which direction these votes are going? Are there early voting exit polls? Yes, I know recent trends point to blue early voting, but that's no guarantee.
They don't release exit polling until after polls close on election day
There is not direct data on who they are voting for, only demographic data. For instance, you can see that currently around 55% of early voters in Georgia are women. In some states you can also look at party registration but that doesn't tell you everything (people often don't update it) and a large chunk are not registered, but that can get you a good idea
I truly hope the good people of Georgia haven’t forgotten that Donald Trump attempted to steal their votes from them in 2020, and I hope they understand he is going to try to do it again if it’s anything short of a Harris/Walz blowout.
Oh he'll try doing something like that again, regardless the raw voter counts and the candidate percentages. If it's close he and his followers will through a hissy fit and the bullshit conspiracy theories about vote fraud will kick off again. If Harris wins by 10+% they will throw a hissy fit and start with a slightly different set of bullshit conspiracy theories. But I get what you're saying: the latter scenario is easier to handle.
It's increasingly the case that the reliable vote is blue due to the realignment of educated people from red to blue. College educated people are super reliable voters.
Well, when you've got people like Trump saying that mail-in voting is fraud, there are going to be some percentage of republicans who take that seriously and won't do a mail-in ballot and will vote in person on election day every time.
Are there any polls of these early votes? Is it tracking higher than 2020, which in itself was a very high amount of votes? I wonder if that is a good thing.
Tracking higher than 2020 numbers in many states. In Georgia, this year's first day early voting turnout (~310k) was over double the 2020 first day early voting (~135k).
Keep in mind that COVID changed voting patterns in 2020 so comparisons can be funky. Even still 2020 had higher early voting turnout (especially by mail) than we had historically seen, so being on track for higher early turnout is great to see
Early voting has historically been heavy in dem's favor and polling on voting prefering suggest that this has not changed all that much. There is a strong partisian divide in voting early vs election day
Exit polling data (asking people who they voted for) is not released until after polls close on election day