We looked at the 1-05 Senate Extra-Double-Vaganza in comparison to the 11-05 General election contest. Perdue-Ossoff (11/3); Warnock-Loeffler (11/3); Perdue-Ossoff (1/5); and Warnock-Loeffler (1/5). And it is clear: because everybody had a go in November, this was definitely a turnout election.
We decided to look at how sharply turnout fell–because it fell everywhere–and who that benefitted. First, we’ll compare Ossoff and Perdue. Jon Ossoff’s vote tally fell by 164,636 counted votes, meaning he enjoyed some coattails from Joe Biden and the rest of the ticket being so exciting. David Perdue, on the other hand, lost 268,535 votes. One could begin to mount the argument that in secular terms, Perdue would have lost on lack of relative partisan enthusiasm alone but that is not all that happened so we won’t do that.
The other contest proves a little more interesting because it ran kind of like a Primary in November, meaning we can look both at relative enthusiasm and also voter identification–did the respective nominees clean up with voters who picked their colleagues instead last year? When you count up all the Democratic votes from November and compare them to what Warnock had in the runoff this week, you see that his tally fell by 149,829 votes. This is similar to Ossoff’s net, though Warnock can be said to have retained roughly 15,000 more votes. Loeffler meanwhile, posted up a loss of 250,543 votes from November. She actually retained roughly 20,000 more votes than Perdue did. It was not enough.
Simply put, Republican support decayed a lot faster than Democratic support. We find that in all but a few counties, Republican participation fell faster than Democratic participation, or that Democrats improved their turnout share in over 90% of counties yesterday. Given that the state is purple in its turnout metrics, and its November results were very close, the numbers we land on for this isolated January runoff are a testament to voter targeting, field organizing, and voter contact.