The polls have opened in the last election left in what was supposed to be a red-wave midterm cycle, and … it’s not looking red-wavy here either. Raphael Warnock seeks a full Senate term in today’s Georgia runoff, having won a special election runoff two years ago, while Herschel Walker hopes to rally enough of Brian Kemp’s voters to defeat the incumbent.

According to Trafalgar, Walker’s running short on that support despite Kemp’s enthusiastic backing in the runoff campaign. He trails Warnock by nearly four points:

Georgia Senate Runoff:

Warnock (D-inc) 51% (+4)
Walker (R) 47%

.@trafalgar_group, 1,099 LV, 12/3-5https://t.co/Q4gS0O5X2g pic.twitter.com/8PaoxmJEUB

— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) December 6, 2022

Astute readers looking for rays of sunshine could look at the sample composition on gender. Women appear to be oversampled in this survey, 55.3/44.7, which seems a bit off. However, don’t put too much hope there, because exit polling from the election four weeks ago showed a similar 53/47 split favoring women. Trafalgar doesn’t include crosstabs in its report, but Warnock won women 53/45 last month and it’s probably not changed much since then. (Walker won men 54/44, which would make it a wash only if the same number of men and women vote.)

What about other polls? This race had nearly no polling until the last week, but since then we’ve seen a deluge in RCP’s aggregation … and it all looks bad for Walker. Not horribly bad, mind you — his biggest deficit is five points, in three different polls — but not a single pollster gives Walker a lead. Half of them put Warnock’s lead slightly past the margin of error, and Walker has an average lead of 51.0/47.3, which is almost exactly the same as Trafalgar’s result.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved the race from Toss Up to Leans Dem yesterday, and not just because of the late-breaking polling:

Finally, what may be the most concrete evidence for a Warnock advantage is the composition of the early vote. Despite an abbreviated timeframe, the runoff has seen robust early turnout. As of Sunday night, close to 1.9 million Georgians had cast an early ballot, a number that is 47% of the total count that last month’s general election saw (this is mostly in-person early voting but that tally also includes some mail-in votes).

As we have mentioned before, Georgia lacks partisan registration. But given the voting patterns in the South, the racial breakdown of the electorate is often informative. A few states over, for example, early voting statistics in his 2019 runoff showed that Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-LA) was on track to secure reelection. With early in-person voting concluded in Georgia, the runoff electorate currently sits at 32% Black by composition. That number represents an increase not just from November’s pre-Election Day electorate (29%) but also from that of the 2020 general election (28%) and the January 2021 runoff (31%). Notice that last cycle, it was a positive sign for Democrats that the Black share inched up from the general election to the runoff — that pattern has again taken hold.

In November, with a somewhat less friendly pre-Election Day electorate, Warnock carried the early vote (in-person plus mail-in ballots) by a 54%-44% spread. Walker finished within a point of Warnock overall by carrying the Election Day vote by a slightly larger 56%-41% margin, although only 36% of the total votes were cast the day of.

It’s not over until it’s over, and some of those early voters might have been Kemp supporters who crossed back over to Walker in this runoff. If Walker has a good ground game (pun only partly in jest), Election Day turnout could make the difference. However, for now it’s clear that Walker’s facing fourth and long and needs to do some broken-field running to get the ball into the end zone.

We’ll have live results this evening, and will keep our fingers crossed the whole day. Stay tuned. And if you’re not worried about this seat because Democrats will control the Senate anyway, be sure to read Duane Patterson’s VIP column from yesterday to see why this race still matters.