Live Coverage: Georgia Senate runoff elections

If you are just checking in on this very pivotal special election night, this is where we stand:

• Roughly 1.67 million ballots, probably around 40% of the overall vote have been tallied, though some large counties have not reported any totals yet or are just reporting scant returns.
• Right now, courtesy of a large reporting of votes out of Atlanta’s Fulton County, the two Democrats (Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff) are both leading with 55-56% of the vote.
• A word of caution: Fulton County, having already reported over 365,000 votes, is an outsized part of the tally thus far. As our own David Jarman noted in his fabulous benchmarks piece, Fulton County usually accounts for about 10-11% of the vote. Right now, it is responsible for well over 20% of it. 

One reason why caution is warranted, even with both Democrats leading by high single digits: hardly any votes have come out of the two large Republican strongholds in northern Georgia: Cherokee County and Forsyth County. They’re likely to be responsible for over 200,000 votes tonight, and thus far only about 5000 have been tallied.

We are now over 2.2 million votes counted, and both Democrats continue to hold 53-47 leads over their Republican counterparts. Still no votes from the two GOP strongholds (Fayette and Cherokee), but also not a huge amount of vote out of three of the Atlanta-area blue-leaning counties (Cobb, Gwinnett, and DeKalb).

Yes…it is weird to call Cobb a “blue-leaning county.”