After beating Walker on election day, Warnock narrowly improved on his margins across the state in the runoff. It was buoyed by a strong enough turnout in the Atlanta area, especially among black voters. And he gained an advantage from early and mail-in voting that Republicans simply couldn’t catch — It is a topic that the Republican Party touches on late after the disappointing midterm elections.

Here are the numbers that explain how the current Democrat pulled it off.

Over 320,000 votes: Warnock’s mail and early voting feature

The results of the runoff in Georgia once again highlighted the recent partisan polarization in voting methods. Since 2020, Republican leaders, including former President Donald Trump, have expressed skepticism about early and absentee voting methods — although a number of Republican leaders other than Trump are rethinking this opposition after losses in Georgia and elsewhere.

Democrats dominated both types of voting during the runoff, with Warnock winning more than 58 percent of the support from those who voted either early or by mail. That partially reflected the demographic groups most likely to vote early: Black voters made up 31.8 percent of those who cast ballots before Election Day, several percentage points higher than in November.

despite of Records set in the first few days Of early voting, the total early voting was much lower than in the January 2021 runoffs, when the early voting period was longer and overall turnout — including voting on Election Day — was over 4.4 million compared to just 3.5 million this year.

But early and absentee voting still allowed Warnock to have a lead of more than 320,000 votes, which Walker couldn’t beat on Election Day. The GOP candidate won the ballot on Election Day by about 225,000 votes, which is not enough to put him at the top.

Only 26 out of 159 counties: Walker improved his profit margin compared to November

Having trailed Warnock slightly in the November runoff-encouraged election, Walker either needed to turn turnout in his favor or improve his margins.

He couldn’t do that. Walker’s share of the bipartisan vote improved in only 26 of the state’s 159 counties, according to a Politico analysis of unofficial results reported by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. The counties he was able to improve on were largely small and rural—accounting for only 5 percent of the total votes cast in the state—so Walker could not get enough votes to offset Warnock’s gains elsewhere.

It was always difficult without popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp also on the ballot, though Kemp jumped into the runoff after his re-election. Despite some split-ticket voting, Kemp’s victory by a greater than 7-point margin likely helped keep Walker close in November.

“Without a candidate like Brian Kemp who was very popular and very good at organizing campaigns and getting people to the polls, it’s easy to see how Reverend Warnock would have hit 50 percent plus one to avoid a runoff,” Jermaine House said. Spokesperson for the progressive research firm HIT Strategies.

The bottom hasn’t completely fallen for Walker. Despite the array of scandals and the Democrats’ outperformance of the Republican Party 2-to-1 in the final weeks before the runoff, it is still a few percentage points away from victory. But he could not make substantive improvements across the state after a disappointing election day, leaving him short of a majority.

Close enough to 90 percent: Turnout compared to November in Democratic strongholds in the Atlanta area

Statewide turnout in the runoff is about 89 percent of what it was in November, with more than 3.5 million voters casting ballots this time around. High turnout does not inherently benefit one candidate or the other. But Walker, who trailed slightly in the November election, needed a relatively higher turnout in GOP-friendly counties than in Democratic-leaning counties. This has not been largely achieved.

Johnson County, Walker’s home in east-central Georgia, was the only county that saw more votes in December than in November. But that didn’t work in Walker’s favor—Warnock increased his share of the vote there slightly.

More importantly for Warnock, Democratic strongholds in metro Atlanta saw a relatively high turnout. In DeKalb County, turnout was higher than the state average. It was slightly lower in Clayton and Fulton counties, but Warnock improved its margin slightly in both, offsetting turnout losses.