I have been playing around with the voter data provided by the Georgia Secretary of State. And the trend of voter registration in the past two years does not look good for Republicans.
Based on voter history files, it looks to me that Gwinnett has added about 44,700 voters who voted the first time since April of 2018. More were added to the rolls but so far haven’t cast a vote. Voters in Georgia don’t register as Democrat or Republican, so the only way to get an idea of how they might vote in the November election is to look at how they voted in the primaries.
If you take those 44,700 voters and count the number of them that voted a Republican ballot earlier this year and the number that voted a Democrat ballot this is what you get:
| Democrat Voters | 12,687 |
| Republican Voters | 3,064 |
It is clear that the Democrats have been WAY more effective in getting people registered to vote than have the Republicans. In Gwinnett County, anyway.
The numbers are barely better if you do the same calculation for everyone that has voted in Gwinnett County in the general election so far this year. The voter is counted as ‘Republican’ if they voted at least once in a Republican primary, ‘Democrat’ if they voted at least once in a Democrat primary. These were for primary votes cast since 2014. If someone voted D one election and R the next then I just added one to each count. Here is what you get for people who have voted early in the November election already:
| Democratic Voters | 101,221 |
| Republican Voters | 82,081 |
If they didn’t vote in a primary, they were not counted becuase I have no idea of which way they lean.
Historically Republicans like to vote on Election Day – I know I do – so hopefully this will turn some as we get final results. But unless Republicans start registering voters we will continue to lose to the Democrats.
If you have access to better numbers, please send me corrections. I would really like to find out that I have been doing some math incorrectly!