A good follow-up to the news that the Georgia election law that Joe Biden compared to Jim Crow has been followed by record early voter turnout: Not only is the overall early voter turnout higher than ever before, but the early vote among minorities is higher than ever before.
According to figures released by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, as of yesterday, May 18, 102,056 more black voters have cast early votes in this year’s primary elections than in 2018 — this is more than three times the number of blacks casting early votes in 2018. (Georgia requests the race/ethnicity of voter registration applicants, and the secretary of state “maintains robust voter registration and turnout data by race/ethnicity.”)
Of the voting electorate, black voters make up 2.75 percent more of the total electorate than 2020. This is not the result that one would expect if the legislation was aimed at voter suppression, and “makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” as President Biden put it.
Georgia does not register voters by party, but the Georgia Secretary of State’s office knows which party primary these voters are casting ballots in, and the numbers so far show minority voters are growing more interested in the GOP primary. Five times as many Hispanic voters are casting Republican ballots in this year’s primary as they did in 2018, five times as many Asian voters are casting Republican ballots in 2022 as there were in 2018, and four times as many black voters are casting GOP ballots this year.
It is worth noting that Georgia did not have a U.S. Senate election in 2018, although it did have a fairly competitive GOP gubernatorial primary, and Stacey Abrams generated her own attention as she won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. The fact that this year’s GOP Senate primary features Herschel Walker, arguably the greatest college football player of all time who won a national championship with the University of Georgia, probably helps stir public interest in the race, as well as President Trump’s furious denunciations of incumbent GOP governor Brian Kemp, although Kemp is leading the polls by a wide margin.
So far, 565,000 people have early voted in Georgia—a 153 percent increase from the same point in the early voting period in the 2018 primary election, and a 189 percent increase in the same point in the early voting period in the 2020 primary election.
It is possible that this early vote turnout is just taking a bite out of the election day vote, and that turnout in this year’s Georgia primaries won’t be anything special. But right now, the early vote is about half of the total turnout in the 2018 primaries (not counting the GOP runoff). Legislation that Democrats insisted was a sinister plot to keep Georgians away from the polls has, so far, yielded a lot more Georgians coming out to vote.