Georgia Breaks Single-Day Early Voting Record as Warnock Leads in Polls

A record number of early voters flocked to the polls in a heavily watched race between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and challenger Republican Herschel Walker. Warnock, who won his seat in January 2021 helped land Democrats control of the Senate for the past two years with his first victory.

More than 353,000 voters turned out on Friday to have their say in the United States Senate race between Warnock and Walker. The number of early voters who showed up on Friday shattered the state of Georgia’s single-day early voting record. Thus far more than 1.85 million people have voted in the runoff before Tuesday, and 76,000 of those are new voters.

While it’s hard to predict who will win Georgia’s seat in the US Senate, but both Democrats and Republicans are keeping a close eye on the race, because even though Democrats already have control of the Senate---following John Fetterman’s win in the Pennsylvania Senate race, and Catherine Cortez Masto’s win in Nevada---keeping Warnock’s seat in Senate will give them more power with 51 votes.

Mandated voting throughout Georgia’s counties from Monday through Friday of this week most likely played a hand in the record-breaking voting numbers, and in some areas wait times at voting polls even exceeded two hours.

“You could celebrate it,” said Michael McDonald, an early voting expert at the University of Florida who runs the United States Elections Project. “Or you could be concerned because the long lines may deter some people from voting.”

Black voters, who are a key component of the Democrat's party base in Georgia, made up a greater share of the early electorate compared to previous elections and made up 32.4% of early voters this week (before Friday), according to John Couvillon, a Louisiana-based Republican pollster.

Others who voted included: 56% of women, 44% of men, 55% of white voters, and Latinos and Asian Americans made up for less than 2% of early voters.

So far, polls show Warnock to have a slight edge over Walker with 52% of voters saying they’d back the incumbent.

Walker, the former football star who has been embroiled in scandals, is running on an extreme anti-abortion platform, had two former girlfriends come forward with claims that he had pressured them into getting abortions, and that he had paid for their medical procedures. The two women provided evidence for their claims. Walker’s own son, Christian Walker, also publicly condemned his father on TikTok as a “liar” and a person who is not a “family man”.

The GOP most likely has its doubts about Walker, as the election season saw voters across the country reject inexperienced Republican nominees with extreme political platforms and who were, in most cases, backed by former President Donald Trump, who is himself a controversial figure.

“Herschel Walker doesn’t have the capacity to land a closing message,” said Ben Burnett, a Republican podcast host in Georgia and former city councilman in Alpharetta, an Atlanta suburb. “And the affiliation and support that he got from Donald Trump… is still a boat anchor around him with the 5 percent of voters that he couldn’t afford to lose.”