I spent the first 23 years of my life in Georgia. My family still lives there. Georgia politics are near and dear to my heart and I've got loads of support for some great politicans who've hailed from Georgia: Max Cleland, John Lewis, Sam Nunn, Cynthia McKinney, and others.
I'm glad that the senate race is going to a run-off and I'm hoping like hell that Saxby Chambliss is ousted. I've already called my mother to make sure that she marked December 2nd on her calendar. Part of me wants to fly down for the weekend before to participate in the GOTV efforts. But beyond the very real chance that we have for picking up the Senate seat, I think that we should look a little more closely at the allocation of Georgia's 15 electoral votes.
Here's some math to back me up.
There are still 600,000 early ballots from the Atlanta metro region left to count. Not counting those votes, McCain is ahead in GA by 210,796 votes. Unsurprisingly, Fulton & DeKalb both went for Obama by wide margins (69% & 79%, respectively). Likewise unsurprisingly, Cobb & Gwinnett both went for McCain by softer margins (54% & 55%, respectively). Fulton has just under a million inhabitants at 992k, DeKalb has 737k, Gwinnett has 588k, & Cobb has 692k. Reports of early voting in Georgia said that Obama was heavily favoured and the Democratic party did emphatically push early voting, so it wouldn't be untoward to suggest that the early vote results for GA were meaningfully different than the election day votes and that they would be Democrat-tilted. I haven't found info yet on how many votes are left outstanding for each of the counties, but let's play a little game with it, k?
Let's allocate those 600,000 uncounted votes amongst the 4 counties proportionally to their populations: Fulton gets 33%, DeKalb gets 24.5%, Cobb gets 23%, & Gwinnett gets 19.5%.
If the Obama v McCain margin is the same for those 600,000 early votes as it was on the election day votes, according to this rubric, Obama picks up 351,630 to McCain's 227,670: a difference of 123,960. That's not enough to flip the state.
If the earlier voters were 5% more in the Obama column, which isn't an implausible conjecture, the numbers shift such that Obama picks up 396,330 votes to McCain's 197,670: a difference of 198,660, or only trailing McCain in the state by 12,136 votes. That's enough to warrant a second look.
I'm not getting in line to demand a Georgia recount here by any means, but I think that they should finish the count.