Surge in new voter registrations could flip Georgia Senate seats blue

Georgia has seen a surge in new voter registrations that suggest good news for Democrats looking to win control of the Senate, according to new data published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Since the Nov. 3 general election, a whopping 76,000 people have registered to vote in the Peach State, according to data published by the AJC.

And a majority of those new registrants, or 56%, are voters under 35 — an age demographic that skews overwhelmingly Democratic.

In the 2020 election in Georgia, President-elect Joe Biden won voters aged 30 to 44 by a 10-point margin, according to exit poll data. Biden won the 18 to 29 age demographic by an even larger 13-point spread.

Biden also won first-time voters in 2020 by a 7-point margin, according to the exit poll data.

Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group launched by Democrat Stacey Abrams, has made registering new voters ahead of the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia a top priority.

While Abrams’ group seeks to bring more voters into the fold, the Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are suing on to block the newly registered voters’ ballots from being counted. The lawsuit, filed Thursday, is one of a number of cases Republicans have filed since the Nov. 3 general election to make voting harder in the state.

Two of those lawsuits were thrown out by federal judges on Thursday.

If Democrats win both of those seats in January, they will control the Senate for the first time since 2014, ousting Mitch McConnell as majority leader.

Control of the Senate could ensure Biden could confirm his Cabinet nominees. It would also allow Biden to fill judicial vacancies and to pass am ambitious legislative agenda that includes a number of bills already passed in the Democratic-controlled House that McConnell has blocked for nearly two years.

Polling shows both of the races are close, with Democratic nominees Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock running neck and neck with Perdue and Loeffler, respectively.

The races went to runoffs because no candidates garnered at least 50% of the vote in the general election.

Perdue received 49.7% to Ossoff’s 47.9% in November.

The second Senate race was a special election with different rules, where all candidates — regardless of party — ran on the same ballot. Warnock came in first among the all-party field with 32.9% of the vote, while Loeffler took the second-place spot with 25.9%.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.