Election Day — Nov. 5, 2024
Good morning! If you haven’t already voted, don’t forget: Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. In 2020, The Associated Press first reported Georgia results at 7:20 p.m. ET on Nov. 3 and declared Biden the state’s winner at 7:58 p.m. ET on Nov. 19, more than two weeks after Election Day. Questions, comments, or story ideas? You can reach me at craig.thecurrent@gmail.com
ANALYSIS: VOTING
What we’re watching
Early voter turnout in Coastal Georgia has been robust, hovering near or surpassing 50% across Georgia’s 1st congressional district, writes The Current’s editor-in-chief Margaret Coker. That gives political analysts plenty of data to digest and provides Democratic and Republican campaign operatives with plenty of information to fuel their worries about the fate of their party’s candidate.
Will women decide the vote?
In early voting, a key voting bloc has shown up in force: women.
As of Monday, 56% of early voters have been women — a percentage that has crept upwards during the last ten days, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. In Chatham County, 57.7% of early voters were women; in Liberty and reliably Republican Glynn, the percentage of early women voters was 56.2%.
Does this point to the success of the messaging by Kamala Harris’ campaign, which has prioritized women’s rights and reproductive rights? Pre-election polls have shown that Harris has built support among older and younger women alike.
On the Republican side, Donald Trump‘s campaign has spent millions of dollars to appeal to a traditional male constituency. Will men turn out for him on Tuesday and tighten what appears to be a yawning gender gap in presidential preferences?
Look especially to Savannah suburbs like Pooler for clues about how the gender gap will affect Georgia’s election results.
How many voters will defect from their party’s candidate?
In the 2020 election, Coastal Georgia voters favored Trump by a margin of 12%. But Joe Biden won statewide by a margin of 11,779 votes — or less than a quarter of a percentage point of the more than 6,998,400 votes cast in the presidential race.
Crucial to Biden’s victory in Georgia was the roughly 8% of the state’s GOP voters who voted for Republicans down ballot but didn’t vote in the presidential race. What will they do this year?
In reliably Democratic Chatham County, will Democrats defect from their party’s candidates in closely watched races for district attorney and commission chairman?
The district attorney’s race between Democratic incumbent Shalena Cook Jones and Republican Andre Pretorius has been especially contentious. Supporters of Pretorius and Joel Boblasky, who is challenging Chester Ellis for commission chair, know the only way their candidates will prevail is if Democratic voters dump their candidates and vote for theirs. Will they?
Who’s trimming the margins?
Georgia is full of reliably Republican counties, and early voter turnout in 2024 has been strong there. The Harris campaign, however, has focused time, attention and money on attracting more votes from Georgia counties outside the metro areas that may be majority Republican but have sizable minority or Democratic voters.
The reason? They hope to cut into the GOP’s margins and exceed President Joe Biden’s vote total of four years ago.
Ware County, where approximately 30% of the population is Black and where 69.7% of local voters selected Trump in 2020, is a place to watch in Coastal Georgia to see how these margins are trimmed — or grow — on Tuesday.
In terms of early voting in 2024 in Ware, Black voters comprised 20.9% of the 10,701 people who have already cast ballots. Women in the county have also shown up early to vote in higher numbers than they did in 2020.
Both parties have a chance to run up a few thousand votes in counties like Ware, depending on voter turnout on Tuesday. Those votes may prove the difference in what’s expected to be a razor-tight election.
Republican family dysfunction
Georgia Republican leaders have spent weeks trying to bridge the enthusiasm gap between Trump’s supporters and more establishment party members who say privately that they’re tired of the former president’s lies and the chaos he seems to create.
Bulloch County may prove a bellwether just how successful GOP leaders have been. Its votes could provide clues about Trump’s chances in exceeding his vote total in 2020 — and how the rest of the state will go.
In 2020 61% of voters —or 18,386 Bulloch residents — chose Trump in 2020. Since then, this once rural county has witnessed drastic changes spurred by the Hyundai electric vehicle plant and the expanding port in Savannah.
The local Republican Party has split over these development-related issues, with some supporters of Gov. Brian Kemp and those of Trump coming down on opposite sides. These local spats, as much as national campaign talking points, could affect ballot decisions.
Meanwhile, Statesboro, home of Georgia Southern University, has a Black mayor and sizable population of Democrats. Almost 18% of the 21,578 early voters in the county were 18-29 year olds — a demographic wave that could shape the future of Georgia as a red or purple red state.
NEWS:ELECTIONS
Not ‘running scared’
At a Chatham County fundraiser two years ago, 1st District U.S. Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter cautioned any candidate for elected office against the dangers of complacency and taking the support of voters for granted. “As I always say, there’s only two ways to run: unopposed or scared. I’m gonna be runnin’ scared.”
In his bid for a fifth term in Congress, Carter isn’t running unopposed — Richmond Hill Democrat Patti Hewitt is standing against him for Coastal Georgia’s seat in Congress. Still, he has shown no signs of “running scared.” There’s been little evidence of him running at all.
Carter has declined at least two invitations to debate Hewitt. At a “meet-the-candidates” segment hosted by WTOC-TV last week, he didn’t appear on the same studio set with his Democratic opponent.
Carter didn’t mention Hewitt’s name or acknowledge that he was running for reelection. Nor did he perform that election-season ritual of every candidate: asking constituents for their votes. In other words, in this and other public appearances in recent months, there has been no evidence — his political admonition two years ago aside — that he is “running scared” for reelection, The Current’s Craig Nelson reports.
In Carter’s latest election campaign, he has had plenty of reason to behave like a shoo-in for reelection. Among other things, his campaign war chest in this election cycle has dwarfed Hewitt’s by a margin of more than 40-to-1, with Carter reported receipts to his campaign committee totaling $2,337,173.27 to Hewitt’s $56,910, according to campaign finance reports filed to the Federal Elections Commission.
UPDATES
3 things for your radar
- Concerned about any incident arising at your polling station where you feel physically threatened? First call 911, your county sheriff or municipal police department. For complaints of voting rights concerns, threats of violence to election officials or staff, and election fraud, contact the U.S. Justice Department’s district elections officer at 912-652-4422.
- Be sure to listen to the latest episode of Coastal Navigator by The Current’s Gillian Goodman. In this week’s installment, she speaks with reporters from The Current about their takeaways from this election season.
- Savannah Mayor Van Johnson will deliver his state of the city address tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Civic Center Ballroom at 301 W. Oglethorpe Ave.
MAKE A PLAN: Come to thecurrentga.org as the polls close tonight and follow the presidential and local votes, and what Coastal Georgia voters are saying. We’ll have live updates on maps and charts showing U.S. voting patterns and the Congressional balance of power as races are called by The Associated Press. See you there!
Carter shows no signs of ‘runnin’ scared’
Since his first Congressional run, Buddy Carter has won handily each term, and his direct campaigning against challenger Patti Hewitt is nearly nonexistent.
Fact check: Election lies to lay groundwork for challenging 2024 results
Trump has refused to say, repeatedly, whether he will accept the results regardless of the outcome. And he’s claimed cheating is already underway, citing debunked claims or outrageous theories with no basis in reality.
Election skeptics target voting officials with ads that suggest they don’t have to certify results
The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes.
FBI links video falsely depicting voter fraud in Georgia to ‘Russian influence actors’
The announcement that the video was fake represented an effort by the FBI and other federal agencies, four days before Tuesday’s elections, to combat foreign disinformation by calling it out rather than letting it spread for days unchecked.
Georgia county says more than 3,000 absentee ballots being mailed late just days before election
A judge ruled Friday that Cobb County voters receiving their absentee ballots late can return them by Nov. 8, three days after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked by Tuesday.
Lawyers are allowed into Giuliani’s NYC apartment after he misses a deadline for turning over assets
A judge ordered Giuliani last week to give election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, many of his prized possessions after he was found to have defamed them.
Sapelo residents file to put zoning ordinance on hold
Gullah Geechee residents, descendants of enslaved West Africans, fear the resulting gentrification and higher taxes that come with it will force them from their ancestral land. County commissioners say the decision will bring in more property taxes.
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