Georgia early voting tops 1 million. Here’s what the numbers tell us.

Georgia voters have already cast more than 1 million ballots, offering a revealing glimpse of an electorate that will decide some of the nation’s most closely watched midterm races.

The early numbers offer more encouraging signs for Democrats than Republicans, particularly in metro Atlanta and other left-leaning parts of the state.

But the picture is far from one-sided. Turnout is surging in some of Georgia’s most important GOP strongholds, leaving both parties scrambling to decipher what it means for the Nov. 3 election.

• Roughly 400,000 early voters live in areas that strongly supported Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, compared with about 380,000 from communities where President Donald Trump dominated, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
• About 21% of voters in strong Harris areas have returned to the polls so far, compared with 16% in deep-red Trump territory.

Other early indicators point to Democratic enthusiasm.

• Black voters, the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency, account for about 35% of the early vote, according to the Georgia Votes tracking site.
• Women outnumber men by roughly 10 percentage points, another potentially favorable sign for Democrats who have benefited from a significant gender gap in recent elections.
• Overall turnout is running slightly ahead of the same point in the 2022 midterms, when Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock both won reelection.

Those patterns track with a potential enthusiasm gap captured in a new AJC poll, which found that 68% of likely Democratic voters were very enthusiastic about their choices in November, compared with 48% of Republicans.

The same poll found that 63% of Black likely voters described themselves as very enthusiastic, compared with 48% of white likely voters.

The geographic breakdown offers another window into the early turnout patterns.

Participation has been particularly strong across much of Democratic-friendly metro Atlanta and in other left-leaning communities, including Athens-Clarke County, Macon’s Bibb County, Savannah’s Chatham County and Augusta’s Richmond County.

Fulton County, the state’s most populous, was the first to reach 100,000 early votes. DeKalb County, another critical Democratic stronghold, is approaching that milestone.

Meanwhile, turnout is lagging in stretches of rural South and Middle Georgia, areas where Republicans have built commanding margins that help offset Democratic advantages in the Atlanta suburbs and other population centers.

Still, Republicans can point to encouraging signs of their own.

• Early participation has jumped compared with 2022 in Cherokee and Forsyth counties, two fast-growing conservative strongholds that have become linchpins to the GOP’s statewide strategy.
• Turnout is also climbing in parts of northwest Georgia, including Whitfield County, where Trump rallied supporters in Dalton on Friday and urged them to “pretend” he’s on the ballot.

Those Republican bastions ringing Atlanta’s outer suburbs could be every bit as important to GOP nominee Rick Jackson’s campaign for governor and U.S. Senate nominee Mike Collins as the inner suburbs are to Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff.

Another revealing figure: Roughly 160,000 early voters, about 15% of the total, didn’t participate in the 2022 general election, according to the Georgia Votes tracking site. About one-third are Black.

That’s a significant bloc of voters who sat out the last midterm, and one that both parties will be watching to see whether occasional voters are becoming a bigger force in this year’s election.

But the early figures come with some crucial caveats.