Bernard Reynolds · October 19, 2026
The count is up almost 29,000 since Sunday morning's snapshot (9:32 a.m. ET), a smaller jump than the roughly 95,000 added the day before. I would like to give you a reason, and I can't. That stretch includes a Sunday, and I have not confirmed Sunday voting hours, so I am not going to guess.
The 2022 comparison is where things have moved fastest. GeorgiaVotes, as of 8:35 a.m. ET, has 2026 at about 863,000 against about 844,000 at the same point in 2022, which puts this year a little over 2 percent ahead. A day ago the gap was about one and a half percent. On Saturday the two years were basically even, and on Friday 2026 was about 5 percent behind. One caution: GeorgiaVotes is a different source with a different timestamp than the official count, so treat the percentage as approximate. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said on October 14 that he expects total turnout to beat the 2022 record. In-person early voting runs through October 30, and the last day to request an absentee ballot is this Friday, October 23.
Here are the biggest counties, with ballots accepted as of this morning, the change since Sunday, and the model's estimate of the party split:
A word on that party split, because it is the number people will quote. Georgia does not register voters by party, so these are modeled estimates from L2 voter data, not official results. The model covers about 540,000 voters as of 12:30 p.m. ET on October 16, so it runs a few days behind the official count, and it puts about 5 percent of voters in neither column. It estimates who voted. It does not tell you how they voted, and early-vote totals measure participation, not preference.
Nationally, the counts I can verify range from about 3.5 million (a tracker cited by Political.org on October 13) to 6.2 million (University of Florida Election Lab, reported October 15). Nothing newer turned up, and I found no same-point 2022 comparison, so read it as a range, not a total.
The newest governor poll I can confirm is InsiderAdvantage, taken October 12 and 13 among 800 likely voters, with a margin of error of about 3.5 points: Republican Rick Jackson at 49 percent and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms at 47, inside the margin. On the Senate side, the latest I found is an InsiderAdvantage result reported September 25, with Democrat Jon Ossoff at 50 percent and Republican Mike Collins at 42, and 8 percent undecided. That report did not say when the poll was taken, and I found nothing newer, so give it less weight than the governor's number.
The campaigns are focused on turnout. On Saturday, Bottoms and Ossoff drew more than 1,500 supporters to the Cobb Galleria Centre, a day after President Trump rallied in Dalton with Jackson and Collins. Atlanta News First reports that former President Barack Obama will campaign in metro Atlanta on October 28 for Ossoff and Bottoms; the location has not been released.
The General Assembly convenes January 11, 2027, with a new governor, a Senate result on the books, and possibly a different Public Service Commission. Tax proposals, utility regulation and the budget will all be on the table. If no candidate wins a majority, the runoff is December 1. If your organization has an issue, do not wait for the results to decide who will carry it. Pick your advocate, find the committees that will hear it, and start building relationships before the runoff.
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Bernard Reynolds is the principal of True North Strategies, a Georgia public affairs firm.
