Live Coverage: Georgia Senate runoff elections

Greetings, Daily Kos readers, and welcome to the main event! Polls have just closed in Georgia, though voters who were in line by 7 PM ET are still eligible to cast ballots. Most reports suggest, though, that there were few lines across the state, due to a continued surge in mail and early voting. Which brings us to a few key points for the evening:

1. Votes will not come in uniformly. In November, smaller, rural counties that favored the GOP typically reported first, while the larger urban counties did not complete their tallies until several days later. As a result, it’s likely that, once again, early returns will favor the Republican candidates.
2. Election Day votes will likely favor Republicans; mail votes will likely favor Democrats. Again, we saw this in November. Democrats urged their voters to protect their health by requesting and returning mail ballots early, while Donald Trump’s attacks on absentee voting led many GOP voters to spurn the idea and vote in person instead.
3. We probably won’t know the winners tonight. It wasn’t until three days after Nov. 3 that Joe Biden took the lead in Georgia and never relinquished it. The Associated Press also didn’t call a runoff in the Jon Ossoff-David Perdue race until then as well. A procedural change that made pre-processing of ballots mandatory rather than optional should help, but we’re likely in for another long ride.

That said, sit back, grab a beverage of your choice, and stick with us as we bring you all the results!

So far, we’ve only seen a smattering of returns from a handful of the state’s (gasp) 159 counties. So don’t overthink the early returns: good or ill.

As is our usual practice, we’re going to wait until we have a substantial portion of the vote tallied before we start drilling down into the numbers. Typically we ballpark this at 10%, but that’s just a rough estimate, since we can’t even be certain what turnout is like. Tonight, though, we’ll use November as a guide. About 5 million votes were cast in the Senate races, and while the total is likely to be different today, we’ll figure on 500,000 votes for our benchmark.

The benchmark has now been hit! And here is what we know—it is extremely close, and Rev. Raphael Warnock is running only a tiny bit ahead of Jon Ossoff among the Democrats. Both men lead their opponents at this very early juncture: Warnock is leading Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) by a 52.5-47.5 margin, while Ossoff is leading Sen. David Perdue by a 52.2-47.8 margin.