The country is on pins and needles on Election Day in an incredibly tight presidential race. While most experts are cautioning that the race is unlikely to be called Tuesday night and could stretch into the days ahead, there’s one big battleground state that could reveal results early. Very early.
Polls close in Georgia at 7 p.m. ET, but unlike past years where the vote totals took hours to accumulate, things will be extremely different in 2024. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki broke it down on “Morning Joe” Tuesday morning.
“This is gonna be different than we’ve experienced in the past. The law has changed in Georgia and if it goes to plan, we are gonna get a ton of votes in Georgia very fast when 7:00 comes around. I’m talking about 80% of the entire vote in the first hour, 7-8 p.m. It’s a new state law. All of the early vote, all of the mail vote has to be reported out in that first hour and we’ve seen 4 million people in Georgia vote early so far.”
The 4 million early votes marked a record number of early voting for the state of Georgia. By contrast, 2.7 million early votes were cast in 2020.
Kornacki also explained what experts will be looking for when these early Georgia results come in – specifically whether the Atlanta metro area continues to grow.
“The blue counties in the Atlanta metro area, they are big, they are growing very fast, they are diversifying and they are becoming more and more Democratic. More than 40% of the vote in the state comes out of these counties. Biden got nearly 70% across them four years ago,” he said. “The question, one of the tells for me tonight, is going to be is the Blue Blob getting bigger?”
Watch Kornacki break down Georgia and more election-related coverage in the video below.
