More than 740,000 Georgians rushed to the polls this week for the first few days of early voting in Georgia, a record-breaking surge that has supporters of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump awash in optimism.

It’s too early to read too much into early voting figures. But preliminary figures show signs of pent-up enthusiasm bursting forth at the ballot box — and reasons for both campaigns to be encouraged.

Far more women than men have cast early votes, which stands to benefit a Democratic nominee with a double-digit lead over Trump among women in polls. And analysts say many of the 85,000 first-time voters who have already cast ballots registered shortly after Harris’ first rally in Atlanta.

Republicans indicate their newfound embrace of early voting is paying dividends, too. A broad majority of early voters are 50 and over — a group that tends to favor GOP candidates. And there’s soaring turnout in a handful of rural counties where Trump is expected to dominate.

Still, party leaders say delving too deeply into the data is silly at this stage in the campaign. It’s not clear whether early voting figures indicate a seismic electoral trend or just the continuation of an ongoing shift away from election day voting.

After all, roughly two-thirds of likely Georgia voters — including a sizable chunk of Republicans — indicated in the latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll that they planned to cast their ballots early.

ExploreUpdated early voting tracker: See how many ballots have been cast so far

Credit: Seeger Gray/AJC

Credit: Seeger Gray/AJC

State Sen. Jason Esteves said he’s spent the run-up to every election over the past decade poring over reams of early voting data. After plenty of agonizing, the Atlanta Democrat says he’s learned the hard way not to divine too much from the numbers.

“Every time I try to prognosticate, I’ve been wrong,” he said. “You can’t read into who is voting now and what that means over the next couple of weeks. Trying to read the tea leaves is going to be a pretty pointless activity at this point.”

A turnout strategy ‘working so far’

And yet party strategists can glean some key information from the data, which doesn’t show how people vote but does include other details, including age, gender, race, and participation in past party primaries and general elections.

Campaigns use the findings to decide where to step up their canvassing efforts or stage their next major event. And number-crunchers use that data to build mathematical models to project whether voters are likely Democratic or GOP backers, though it won’t help deduce where swing Georgians will break this cycle.

Republican consultant Mark Rountree’s firm conducted a preliminary review that showed about 46% of early voters so far tend to vote in GOP primaries — a double-digit increase from the same period in the 2020 election.

“At minimum, it shows that Republicans are significantly more energized to vote early than in past campaigns,” Rountree said. “Whatever Republicans are overall doing seems to be working so far.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

That’s the assessment from Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon, who tired of watching Republicans ignore the early voting advantage that Democrats built in Georgia and pressed his party to break from the tradition of focusing primarily on election day turnout.

That outdated strategy was partly driven by Trump, who devoted years to falsely ridiculing absentee and early voting as a vehicle for widespread fraud and deceit.

Then-Vice President Mike Pence was even jeered at a 2020 campaign stop in Atlanta’s northern exurbs when he pleaded with the crowd to cast their ballots early. One attendee memorably told him to “go back to Washington.”

Republican heavyweights now embrace a different message. At party gatherings across the state, McKoon tells skeptical Republicans to view their early vote as he did when he cast his ballot for the GOP nominee: “If I get hit by a bus walking back to my car, I know my last earthly act will have been to put Donald Trump back in the White House.”

Credit: AP

And Trump’s campaign now frequently employs the phrase “make your plan to vote” — a line Georgians may remember from top Democrats throughout the 2020 race. Stacey Abrams, the two-time Democratic gubernatorial nominee, even made a how-to guide that ended with a similar mantra.

A hunt for ‘low propensity’ voters

For Democratic elders, the early voting push has long been a pillar of their election strategy. That’s partly because some voting precincts in heavily Democratic areas have been plagued by long lines and technical errors in past elections, leading to nightmarish waits for some voters.

“Early voting has major advantages for Democrats because voting on election day has major disadvantages,” said state Rep. Saira Draper, one of her party’s voting rights experts.

Harris’ campaign holds multiple get-out-the-vote drives featuring prominent Democrats each day, strategically located in places where the party is hoping to drive turnout.

Some are in deep-blue counties with large Black majorities, others in suburban areas home to split-ticket voters pivotal to Democratic chances of recapturing the state.

Credit: John Spink

“Our coalition is broad. It always has been,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock said. “Our coalition looks like America. And Kamala Harris isn’t taking any part of that coalition for granted.”

Both campaigns have solid strategic reason for the early voting press that goes beyond the simple math of banking as many votes as possible.

The sooner the most likely voters for each candidate cast their ballots, the sooner campaigns can shift attention toward Georgians who don’t often participate in elections. Political types call them the “low-propensity voters,” and each cycle they are an elusive target.

“The more of our voters that get out this week,” McKoon said, “the more our resources can be focused on those low-propensity voters who require being contacted more than a base voter who’s already fired up.”

For voters, campaigns dangle the tantalizing promise of halting the ceaseless stream of text messages, flyers and digital ads to those who cast their ballots early. Some Georgians interviewed at polling sites across the state this week said their early vote also gives them license to tune out of the back-and-forth entirely.

“Everything went smoothly, no issues, no concerns, in and out. It was perfect,” Rodney Swanson said after he cast his ballot in Athens-Clarke County.

“Now I can turn the TV off and be done with those ads.”

Staff writer Fletcher Page contributed to this article.