Georgia has begun early voting and a record-breaking turnout is heating up an already tight race in the battleground state.
All eyes were on the Peach State on Tuesday as voters started heading to the polls to cast early ballots ahead of the November 5 election. Georgia residents have 2 1/2 weeks—from October 15 to November 1—to vote in-person, including two Saturdays. Some counties also offer Sunday voting.
“It looks like this is going to be a record-breaking first day of early voting,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told reporters Tuesday morning. “But we don’t make predictions, we let the voters decide, but it looks like we’re going to have strong early voting today.”
By 2 p.m., Georgia had already broken the record set in 2020, with 187,973 votes. Four years ago, 136,000 votes were cast on the first day of early voting. By Tuesday’s end, more than a quarter of a million votes were cast. Over 12,900 mail-in ballots have also been returned, according to the secretary of state’s election data hub.
With 16 electoral votes, Georgia will likely be a major step in the path to 270. The last time a presidential candidate won the White House without the Peach State was in 2012, when Mitt Romney carried Georgia but lost the presidency to Barack Obama. Donald Trump won the state by a margin of 5.1 percent in 2016, while Joe Biden carried Georgia by a much narrower margin of 0.23 percent, or 11,779 votes, in 2020.
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Polls also show a tight race. Former President Trump has a one-point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, per FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, while RealClearPolitics shows Trump with an even narrower advantage, just half a point ahead of Harris. Still, both predictions are within the margin of error.
“Both campaigns have been suggesting that people who need to vote absentee should do so, but they are pushing early voting significantly,” Audrey Haynes, associate political science professor at the University of Georgia, told Newsweek.
Was Tuesday Good for Trump or Harris?
Going into the first day of early voting, there’s been a “good deal of ground game” from the Democrats and less for Trump’s campaign, Haynes said. But she pointed out that there have been major efforts from some of the state’s top Republicans, like Governor Brian Kemp and former Senator Kelly Loeffler, to establish early voting infrastructure that “certainly work[s] for Georgia Republicans and the ticket in general.”
Harris supporters were quick to declare Tuesday a win for the Democratic nominee, repeating that the early votes outnumber the margin by which Biden won the state four years ago.
“I’m going to take this is a good sign that 11,780 votes aren’t going to be nearly enough this time around,” one supporter wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Political commentator Tristan Snell echoed those comments, tweeting that Tuesday’s numbers were far higher than the record set in 2020, an election that resulted in Biden beating Trump.
“Kamala Harris is on her way to winning by a LOT more,” Snell concluded.
While it is unknown which candidate the early votes favored, information on which counties cast ballots on Tuesday could offer signs. The secretary of state’s office told Newsweek that Georgia’s election data hub will update with the data after polls close at 5 p.m.
“The Atlanta area favors Harris but rural Georgia is Trump country,” political analyst Steve Schier told Newsweek.
Haynes agreed that early voting in Atlanta, plus turnout in Augusta, Macon, Columbus and Savannah, would be welcome news for Harris, but that everywhere else in Georgia could spell promising signs for Trump.
Some experts warned against drawing too many conclusions from the first day of early voting. Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report, said on X that early voting data doesn’t include which candidate Georgia residents chose, nor does it paint a picture of the final electorate. He added that the data can’t be compared to the patterns observed in 2020 because voting has changed so much post-pandemic.
“Resist the temptation to draw inferences at all costs,” Wasserman wrote.
“The campaigns are going to be working hard up to the last moment. The election is tight. And usually as we get closer to election day, it always tightens in the polls,” Haynes said. “But it will not be until election day (or perhaps the next one) that we will know what decision the country has made about who will govern in the White House or who will control the House or Senate or state legislatures.”
2024 Voters Are Excited
“We are seeing a significant burst of voting on the first day of in person early voting,” Haynes said. “The most motivated voters show up day one.”
Georgia’s early voting numbers are part of a national trend that suggests Americans are highly motivated to vote in the 2024 election. A national NBC News poll conducted from October 4 to October 8 found that 5 percent of registered voters had already cast their ballots. Another 47 percent said they planned to vote early, while 3 percent were undecided on voting method, and 1 percent were not planning to vote, leaving only 44 percent planning to vote on Election Day.
Early voting has become increasingly common in recent elections, especially in 2020 when election officials and political campaigns sought to expand voting access during the COVID-19 pandemic. In late October 2020, 68 percent of Americans said they planned to vote early.
Democrats typically vote earlier and by mail more than Republicans, but a Harvard poll conducted from October 11 to October 13 found that Trump has a slight lead among early voters in battleground states at the moment. The survey, which included 3,145 registered voters and had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points, found Trump with 48 percent to Harris’ 47 percent.
Correction 10/15/24, 10:17 p.m. ET: An earlier version of this article said the last time a presidential candidate carried Georgia but did not win the election was in 2004.
