New Voters in the 2018 Georgia Primary Election

Republican readers of the AJC Political Insider may have felt a frisson when they read about a third party’s analysis of the 2018 General Primary Election voters.

Chris Huttman is a Democratic operative now crunching numbers on behalf of Lucy McBath of Marietta, one of two Democratic candidates in the Sixth District congressional runoff. She faces Kevin Abel, a Sandy Springs businessman, in the July 24 runoff.

Huttman sent over a spreadsheet on Wednesday that broke down the GOP and Democratic primaries by race, voting history, and the 14 congressional districts. Some of his findings:

On the other hand,102,330 participants in the Democratic primary, who cast 21 percent of the ballots, were new or had not voted in a primary at least since 2010. On the GOP side, 50,533 were likewise new or infrequent voters – making up 8 percent of Republican ballots cast. A 2-to-1 ratio when it comes to new voters is good news for Democrats.

But the question I wanted an answer to was different. Because a “new” primary voter doesn’t necessarily enhance the party’s November total if they’re only “new” to Primary voting, but have previously voted for the same party in General Elections. So I went to www.PoliticalDataSystems.com to run some numbers of my own.

My primary finding is that substantially identical percentages of 2018 Republican Primary voters (96.70%) had voted in the 2016 General Election as 2018 Democratic Primary voters (96.03%). Unless these voters changed their party preference in the last two years, which is possible, the “new” Democratic Primary voters won’t add appreciably to the 2018 General Election numbers for their party.

2018 Georgia General Primary Voters by General Election Voting History

Data courtesy of PoliticalDataSystems.com