Joe Biden “legitimately” defeated President Trump in November’s election, 61 percent of Georgia voters say, according to preliminary data from the Fox News Voter Analysis, a survey of more than 4,000 voters in the state.
The results of Tuesday’s two U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia will dictate which party takes majority control of the upper chamber in the new U.S. Congress – a fact that drove voters to the polls.
Control of the Senate was the “single most important factor” driving their vote, six in 10 Georgia voters said.
Voter analysis 1/5/21
(Fox News)
The Fox News Voter Analysis was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), an independent, nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago.
OSSOFF, WARNOCK HOLD SMALL LEADS IN GEORGIA BUT MANY VOTES ARE YET TO BE COUNTED
While only five in 10 Democrats thought party control was the biggest factor in placing their vote, seven in 10 Republicans thought the same.
Democratic and Republican officials have been concerned that each party could see a dip in voter turnout during the special election.
Democratic groups like the Georgia chapter of the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union raised concerns about adequate access to fewer polling stations, particularly in Black and Latinx communities.
Republicans in turn have worried about lower GOP voter turnout in the runoff elections after feeling disenfranchised by President Trump’s loss in November.
Officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s repeated claims of voter and election fraud could contribute to “self-suppression” and lower Republican voter turnout — a theory that could prove accurate as NORC polling showed that while 98 percent of Democrats believe November votes were counted “fairly and accurately,” only 30 percent of GOP voters believe the same.
Many Georgians, meanwhile, also believe Biden’s views are “too extreme.”
Georgians were most skeptical of the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challenger to Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, with 52 percent of poll respondents noting that his “political views are too extreme.”
Fifty percent of voters felt the same about Jon Ossoff, the Democrat who challenged Republican U.S. Sen. David Perdue.
Forty-two percent of voters believed Loeffler’s views were “too extreme,” while only 40 percent believed the same of Perdue.
Meanwhile, 56 percent of voters expressed concern over allegations that Perdue and Loeffler had “engaged in insider trading,” while 44 percent of voters said they were not concerned by the allegations.
Of the four Senate candidates, Loeffler saw the highest number of voters believing her to be dishonest and untrustworthy, at 56 percent. Perdue came in second with 54 percent, and both Ossoff and Warnock were believed to be dishonest by about half of voters.
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Votes continued to be tallied late Tuesday after most polls closed at 7 p.m. At least two polling locations in the Peach State were permitted by a court order to stay open later because of technical issues earlier in the day.
All polls were closed by 7:35 p.m.
The Fox News Voter Analysis is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News and The Associated Press. The survey of about 4,000 voters in Georgia was conducted Dec. 28-Jan. 5,, concluding at the end of voting on Tuesday. It combined interviews with a random sample of registered voters drawn from state voter files with self-identified registered voters selected using nonprobability approaches. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
