POLLS: DeSantis Now Outperforms Trump In At Least 4 States

Each poll showed DeSantis with higher margins than previous polling

Why Georgia’s May Actually Be The Most Important Election In Recent History

Every major election has substantial stakes, but today's runoff Senate race in Georgia will determine the country's future for years to come.

Federal judge — who is Stacey Abrams’ sister — orders two Georgia counties to stop removing voters from rolls ahead of Jan. 5 runoffs



A federal judge has ordered two counties in Georgia to reverse course on removing thousands of individuals from voter rolls ahead of the state's Jan. 5 Senate runoffs.

The judge, Leslie Abrams Gardner — who is the sister of former Democratic candidate for governor Stacey Abrams, a prominent ally of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden — issued the ruling Monday, concluding the counties relied on unverified change-of-address data to proceed with the action.

"Defendants are enjoined from removing any challenged voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee Counties from the registration lists on the basis of National Change of Address data," Gardner wrote in the order.

Politico reported that the majority of the registrations officials were seeking to rescind, about 4,000, came from Muscogee County, where Biden claimed an easy victory, while an additional 150 registrations were from Ben Hill County, where President Trump won by a sizable margin.

The number of registrations could prove significant in the hotly contested state where, in November, Biden defeated Trump by just under 12,000 votes and Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler were unable to accrue the majority needed for victory and avoid runoff elections.

The elections boards in each of the counties had approved motions filed by local voters claiming the registrations should be removed based on data from the United States Postal Service's National Change of Address database that allegedly showed the individuals had moved out of the county.

In her Monday order, Gardner ruled that the evidence in each case was not conclusive enough to support their removal and noted that the removals may have violated federal law because the voters were not given proper notice as is required within 90 days of a federal election.

Earlier on Monday, the Muscogee County elections board filed a motion requesting Gardner's recusal from the case given her connection to Abrams, but the request was denied.

Abrams, after losing her run for governor in 2018, has become a vocal proponent of increasing voter registration in the state. Earlier this month, the Georgia secretary of state's office announced it had launched an investigation into the New Georgia Project, a third-party registration group founded by Abrams, for "repeatedly and aggressively" seeking to register "ineligible, out-of-state, or deceased voters" ahead of the runoff elections.

In the motion, lawyers for the board described Abrams as "a Georgia politician and voting rights activist who was the Democratic candidate in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and has since engaged in various highly publicized efforts to increase voter registration and turnout for the 2020 general election in Georgia."

This week, during an interview on CNN, Abrams charged that "Republicans do not know how to win without voter suppression as one of their tools."

Report: Over 100K Georgians who didn’t vote on Election Day have requested ballots for Senate runoffs — and they skew Democratic



More than 100,000 voters who did not vote in Georgia on Election Day have requested mail-in ballots for the state's upcoming Senate runoffs, and the sampling of demographics show they probably lean Democratic, a new report from the Peach State revealed.

What are the details?

As of Thursday afternoon, 108,625 Georgians who did not vote in the November election have applied for ballots to vote in the Jan. 5 runoffs, according to data from georgiavotes.com. The tracking site uses publicly available information from the Georgia secretary of state's website.

The figure, which amounts to 6.3% of all mail-in ballot requests, could be enough to sway results in an election that is expected to be close. Democratic challenger Joe Biden defeated President Trump in the state by a narrow margin of just under 12,000 votes. Both Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler failed to win a 50% majority of the vote, which sent each race to a runoff.

The demographic breakdown of the new runoff applicants skew toward traditionally Democratic voting groups, with non-white voters making up the majority of the sampling. More than 42,000 are white voters while nearly 38,000 are black voters, and the remaining 28,000 classified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, and other.

The demographic breakdown, though perhaps concerning, is certainly not an assurance that Democrats will take the seats due to the fact that Republicans made historic inroads with minority groups during the 2020 election.

What else?

The highly anticipated runoff elections are also reportedly drawing completely new Georgia voters into the state's voter pool. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, nearly 75,000 new voters have registered in the state since the presidential election in November. The news outlet pulled the data from an updated voter registration list purchased from the secretary of state's office.

The Journal-Constitution noted that the new voters are "overwhelmingly young, with 57% of them under 35 years old. Some are new Georgia residents; others just turned 18."

It's worth noting that Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has warned against out-of-state voters temporarily relocating to Georgia to vote in the runoffs. To do so is a felony.

Anything else?

The fact that an increasing number of non-voters are registering ahead of the runoffs doesn't guarantee that they will actually vote or that turnout will be up overall.

Republican strategist Karl Rove argued recently that the mail-in ballot requests overall are down from what they were for the presidential election.

"In November, 1,740,795 people requested a mail-in ballot — 1,362,369 actually exercised it, voted by mail. So today, the requests are half a million less, a third less than they were for the November election," he said.

Current figures on georgiavotes.com show that the vote turnout for the runoff elections is down 9% in comparison to where the vote turnout was for the presidential election at this point. Mail-in allot applications are also down 2%.

"And what you also need to remember is 600,000 of the people on the list for mail-in ballots, 600,000 of that 1.7 million are automatically on the list. They are on the list for a long time. They sign up for permanent mail-in ballots, so they're counted as a request, but we don't know whether or not they are actually going to vote," Rove added.