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GOING BLIND IN GEORGIA. I received an email from a Republican activist Tuesday night describing some new private polling in the two Georgia Senate runoff races. It showed Republican Sen. David Perdue with a narrow lead over Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, and the state’s other Republican senator, Kelly Loeffler, with a more substantial lead over Democrat Raphael Warnock. If true, the numbers would be good news for Republicans.
But the fact is, Georgia polling has been all over the place. Not long before I received the email, a newly-released public poll, by the Trafalgar Group, showed Ossoff with a 2.2 percentage point lead and Warnock with a lead of three-tenths of one percentage point. The larger RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Ossoff with an eight-tenths of one point lead over Perdue and Warnock with a 1.8 point lead over Loeffler.
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But who knows? One poll earlier this month showed Ossoff with a five-point lead, immediately after another poll showed Perdue with a three-point lead. The same two polls showed Warnock with a seven-point lead and Loeffler with a three-point lead.
We do know that a lot of people have already voted. The U.S. Elections Project, which is tracking by-mail and early voting, says 2,566,332 people have voted in the race. That is 33.2 percent of all the registered voters in Georgia, all before election day. One interesting point: 91,347 of those early voters did not vote at all in the general election on November 3. We don’t know who they would have supported. And of the rest who did vote in the general election — we don’t know which side they were on.
Now, the big players are heading to Georgia for one last round of campaigning. President Trump is scheduled to hold a rally on Monday night, election eve, in the northwest Georgia town of Dalton. That is in a Republican area and — this is important — an area where early voting has not been heavy. The county in which Dalton is located, Whitfield County, has had a 25.4 percent turnout in early and mail-in voting, as opposed to some Democratic counties that are above 35 percent. So there are more voters in Dalton who can still turn out for Perdue and Loeffler on election day. On Sunday, Vice president-elect Kamala Harris will campaign for Ossoff and Warlock in Savannah. And on Monday, President-elect Joe Biden will campaign for the Democratic ticket in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to keep the Senate together until the races are decided. McConnell will remain in charge of the majority if Republicans win just one of the two seats at stake. To make sure that happens, McConnell is trying to slow walk some of the more controversial measures before the Senate — like re-working the just-passed coronavirus relief bill to increase the personal benefit from $600 to $2,000 — to avoid putting more pressure on Perdue and Warnock. But it’s not clear that is the right thing to do. Maybe it would be better for Perdue and Warnock if they could vote in favor of the increase. Nobody knows.
That’s the problem with these two races. Coming immediately on the heels of one of the most intense presidential campaigns ever, it’s not clear whether voters will line up mostly as they did on November 3, or whether they will revert to a more Republican leaning, or whether they will do something else entirely. So don’t put much faith in the polls. When it comes to predicting this race, the pollsters don’t know any more than the rest of us.
