More than 670,000 early voters in Georgia did not participate in the 2020 general election, according to analysis by GeorgiaVotes.com.
As of Thursday afternoon, 3,482,358 million Georgians had voted early, and 671,201 did not vote in the 2020 election, a state narrowly won by President Joe Biden.
It's a group that comprises people who weren't old enough to vote in 2020, moved back to Georgia, or just decided to skip the 2020 election, election officials say.
"We think of the electorate as being really static when the much bigger pool of people is not folks who are switching (parties), it's folks who couldn't have voted, didn't vote or couldn't have voted in previous years," Bernard Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The number, however, is dwarfed by the 836,000 early voters at this point in 2020 who didn't participate in the 2016 election. Overall in 2020, 1.5 million voters who didn't vote in the 2016 election did so, representing 31% of all voters, according to the AJC.
Early voting overall is outpacing 2020 by more than 22,000, according to GeorgiaVotes.com.
Early voting turnout is not being dominated by the Democrat strongholds surrounding Atlanta, like DeKalb and Cobb counties, for example, according to the AJC. Percentagewise, sparsely populated rural counties that vote Republican have been huge drivers of early voting, the AJC reported.
The newspaper reported that more than two-thirds of voters in Towns County, for example, had already voted, 15 points above the state average. Trump won Towns with 80% of the vote in 2020. Other rural counties in Georgia's northeast are also seeing higher turnout rates early voting, according to the report.
"You've got to give Republicans credit. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They're adapting to a very different political environment," DeKalb County Chief Executive Michael Thurmond told the AJC. "And that means Democrats have to redouble their efforts."
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.