Indeed, Ossoff ended up winning over 60 percent of the early vote that was reported Tuesday night, and there was speculation on Twitter for a bit that he would win Round 1 outright. This led to a lot of excitement among Democrats. While no poll showed Ossoff getting to 50 percent (even with undecided voters allocated), he was dominating the early vote.
(Even the 2016 polls were much better than the conventional wisdom suggests.) 2. Polls are imperfect tools and have a margin of error, but the Georgia 6 surveys were good. But for a first high-profile test of polling since the 2016 election, when surveys underestimated Donald Trump’s support, Georgia 6 is not consistent with the idea that polling is broken, or that polls are systematically missing Republican support. That doesn’t guarantee that polls for the June runoff will be nearly as predictive. Given that special election polling has tended to be pretty error prone, the polls in Tuesday’s race were nothing short of amazingly accurate. That’s just 2 percentage points off the final result. Ossoff earned 46 percent, on average, 1 in polls taken in the three weeks leading up to the election. So what should we make of Round 1? What do Tuesday’s results tell us about the coming runoff and the 2018 midterms? Here are five takeaways. He’ll face Republican Karen Handel, who finished second with 20 percent of the vote, in a runoff election on June 20. In the primary on Tuesday, Democrat Jon Ossoff won the most votes, with 48 percent, but fell just short of the 50 percent necessary to win outright. The special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District has moved into extra innings.