What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Looking at the counties where more than 99 percent of the expected vote has reported, we see a pattern: both Ossoff and Warnock are slightly overperforming Biden’s vote share in November. And Warnock’s margin looks like it’s just a bit larger than Ossoff’s, consistent with pre-election polling. But be careful in reading too much into these early returns: The results are mostly from very small, rural counties.

How counties are voting in the regular Senate runoff

The current margins, by county, for the Georgia Senate race between Sen. David Perdue (R) and Jon Ossoff (D) and how that margin compares to the county’s final Nov. presidential margin

county	County size	Cand. Margin	Pres. Margin	Diff
Washington	◼️◼️◻️	D+2.5	D+0.8	D+1.7
Ben Hill	◼️◻️◻️	R+23.6	R+26.2	D+2.6
Candler	◼️◻️◻️	R+42.1	R+42.1	R+0.0
Johnson	◼️◻️◻️	R+41.6	R+39.7	R+1.9
Turner	◼️◻️◻️	R+23.5	R+24.8	D+1.2
Lanier	◼️◻️◻️	R+40.3	R+41.7	D+1.3
Chattahoochee	◼️◻️◻️	R+8.2	R+13.5	D+5.3

How counties are voting in the special Senate runoff

The current margins, by county, for the Georgia Senate race between Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) and Raphael Warnock (D) and how that margin compares to the county’s final Nov. presidential margin

county	County size	Cand. Margin	Pres. Margin	Diff
Washington	◼️◼️◻️	D+3.0	D+0.8	D+2.2
Ben Hill	◼️◻️◻️	R+23.3	R+26.2	D+2.8
Candler	◼️◻️◻️	R+42.3	R+42.1	R+0.2
Johnson	◼️◻️◻️	R+41.4	R+39.7	R+1.7
Turner	◼️◻️◻️	R+23.3	R+24.8	D+1.5
Lanier	◼️◻️◻️	R+40.1	R+41.7	D+1.6
Chattahoochee	◼️◻️◻️	R+8.9	R+13.5	D+4.6

Prediction markets now show Democrats as about a 58 percent favorite to win control of the Senate. I’m not sure I’d read much into that, given how weird prediction markets have been lately, though.

This isn’t entirely related to your question about Election Day voting, Micah, but I found it rather mind-boggling, so here we go. This was from ABC News as of 6:00 p.m. ET tonight, but the total early vote included 123,079 people who did not participate in November’s general election, which is 35,000 more votes than the margin that separated Perdue and Ossoff the first time around.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean these voters will break Democratic — but so far, the early vote has been quite good for Democrats. I really want to get a better sense of what Election Day turnout looks like and how that complicates this picture. But in the meantime, who are these voters who voted in the runoff but not in the general?