Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Raphael Warnock’

Jan 12

6 Comments

The making of a political earthquake that tipped the U.S. Senate

If football is a game of inches, politics is one of fractions — a glacial shift in demographics, incremental growth in voter registration, tiny changes in voter turnout.

In isolation, individual events like these may seem small and insignificant. In combination, they are like the grinding of tectonic plates that can remake an entire landscape.

That’s what’s been happening in Georgia for the past decade. The first big tremor finally hit on November 3, when the state sided with a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992. An even bigger shaker hit last Tuesday, January 5, when Georgians deposed incumbent Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and replaced them not just with Democrats, but with the Black pastor of Martin Luther King’s church and a 33-year-old Jewish television documentary producer. Neither had held office before.

But it’s the aftershocks that are already rippling across the state that will reshape Georgia’s politics for generations to come. They will also spell an end to rural dominance at the State Capitol, although the death throes may go on for several years.

The dust hasn’t even settled on Tuesday’s Senate runoffs and the state’s political sights are already being leveled at 2022 and the next round of races for the state’s constitutional offices, including one of the two U.S. Senate seats, governor, lieutenant governor and — perhaps most notably — secretary of state.

Brad Raffensperger, the Republican incumbent secretary of state, is almost certainly being considered for a John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award, but right now he can’t leave home without a bodyguard. Now halfway through his first term, Raffensperger was a low-profile state legislator before throwing his hat in the ring for secretary of state; then, having an (R) after his name was enough to allow him to squeak past John Barrow, a former Democratic congressman, in a runoff.

Now, his insistence on actually counting Georgia’s presidential and senatorial votes — and his temerity in standing up to direct pressure from President Trump — may have doomed him politically. The current political firestorm may pass, but right now it’s difficult to see how he survives a credible GOP primary challenge, which he will almost certainly draw.

And then there’s the governor’s race. The Republican incumbent, Brian Kemp, is in little better shape than Raffensperger.  Kemp was already saddled with horrific Covid-19 numbers when the presidential election blew up in his face.  Long accustomed to easy walks in the park in presidential elections, Georgia Republicans were plainly caught off guard when, very late in the race, the Peach State suddenly started showing up on national battleground radars.

Kemp was placed in the exquisitely difficult position of having to tell the president — to whom he quite literally owes his election — that any effort to have the Georgia General Assembly overturn the state’s election results would be doomed to failure.  Trump is now promoting the likely gubernatorial candidacy of former U.S. Representative Doug Collins, the frenetic Gainesville Republican who defended Trump during the House impeachment fight.

Whoever survives that death cage match will probably face Stacey Abrams in the 2022 General Election. The architect and field general of the Democratic Party’s rebirth in Georgia, Abrams might yet be recruited to some high-profile position in Joe Biden’s Washington, but the smart money is that she’s hanging around for another run at the governor’s office, which she very narrowly lost to Kemp in a runoff two years ago.

Runoffs have, indeed, become a thing in Georgia. They were put into place by the state legislature more than a half-century ago after a U.S. Supreme Court “one man/one vote” decision drove a stake through the heart of Georgia’s infamous county-unit system. Runoffs became the new rural bulwark against Atlanta’s growing (Black) population and rising (Black) political power — and they worked until they didn’t.

Which brings us back to fractions (and, increasingly, whole numbers).  Population growth and demographic shifts may have favored the Democrats in recent years, but Republicans have stayed in the game by outhustling them at the polls.  In the 2018 governor’s race, the 29 mostly urban and suburban counties that sided with Abrams were home to well over half-a-million more registered voters than the 130 largely rural counties that went for Kemp.  But the voter turnout in the Kemp counties was 61.5 percent versus an even 60 percent in the Abrams counties; that edge, and the Republicans’ continuing hold on at least a portion of the suburban vote, enabled Kemp to squeak by.

In the 2020 General Election – with Trump at the top of the ticket – Republicans actually grew their turnout advantage.  The Republican counties turned out 68.8 percent of their voters to 65.3 percent for the Democratic counties – a plump, 3.5-point advantage – and Perdue built a daunting 100,000-vote lead to take into the runoff.  Even though Loeffler trailed Warnock in the 20-candidate “jungle primary” for the other Senate seat, she was presumed to have a similar advantage going into the runoff.

But without Trump on the ballot – and with his regular assaults on Kemp, Raffensperger and the reliability of Georgia’s elections system – the GOP turnout advantage fell to about 1.2 percentage points.  At the same time, based on data available from the Secretary of State’s office, the Democratic-voting counties fattened their already big lead in the total number of registered voters by more than 150,000, and the political algebra simply became overwhelming.

As did the voting options.  In the early in-person and mail voting, Ossoff and Warnock ran up 400,000-plus vote margins that Perdue and Loeffler couldn’t erase with strong election day showings.  In the end, Ossoff won by 51,150 votes and Warnock by 89,404.  Both margins were outside the recount margins and big enough that both Perdue and Loeffler threw in their respective towels, thereby depriving the state’s barristers of another marathon round of post-election litigation.

Those margins may, of course, exaggerate the state of play in Georgia politics, but it’s difficult to find much good news for the state’s Republicans in these latest results.  They did have some down-ballot victories, but all in all this year’s extended political season brought the urban-rural divide into starker relief.

For the GOP, Metro Atlanta was basically reduced to fly-over country.  Trump’s three rallies on behalf of Perdue and Loeffler were held in Valdosta, Macon and finally Dalton (where, incidentally, the local 14-day Covid-19 case rate was more than six times the number required to make the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force’s red zone list).  For his part, Vice President Pence made a final campaign swing, on January 4, through Milner, Ga. (pop. 654).  Suffice to say, neither Milner nor Dalton quite got the job done. 

The general election and runoff results almost certainly presage a period of Republican-on-Republican political violence that will extend through the current regular session of the Georgia General Assembly and a special reapportionment session later this year, when any remaining survivors will convene to draw new legislative district lines.  Further GOP collateral damage seems certain, especially in South Georgia.

At this point, the Georgia Republican Party’s options appear limited.  A state party official’s apparently serious 2019 suggestion  that Republicans use what he called a “fertility advantage” to outbreed Democrats has yet to yield much known success.  In the wake of last Tuesday’s Senate runoffs, the only known GOP policy response has not been to propose legislation addressing their districts’ economic, educational or healthcare needs, but, as the AJC reported last week, to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, ballot drop boxes and unsolicited absentee ballot application mailings. 

© Trouble in God’s Country 2021

Dec 27

Ossoff and Warnock likely building up strong early vote leads. Will they be enough to withstand GOP turnout on election day?

Heading into the final week of early voting, Georgia Democrats appear to have crystallized several foundational advantages that could put challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock within striking distance of incumbent Republican U.S. Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in their tag-team match for the state’s two Senate seats and control of the United States Senate.

Indeed, TIGC’s analysis of a wealth of early voting data available primarily from Georgia’s Secretary of State and the website http://www.georgiavotes.com strongly suggests that Ossoff and Warnock have already banked healthy leads in early mail and in-person voting — and, perhaps more worrying for Perdue and Loeffler, that GOP fears of a drop-off in votes from voters whose primary loyalty was to President Trump may well be materializing.

If Perdue and Ossoff are holding the same county-level vote shares in the runoff they received in the general election, Ossoff has banked an early-vote lead of nearly 42,000 votes so far. What’s more, two-thirds of the nearly 528,000 absentee mail ballots that have yet to be returned are in the hands of voters in the Ossoff counties. If all those ballots are returned and the general election vote-shares hold for them as well, Ossoff’s early vote lead would swell to more than 93,000.

Roughly the same would presumably hold true for the Warnock-Loeffler race, but it’s impossible to conduct the same kind of vote-share analysis for their race: they earned their places in the January 5 runoff by emerging as the top two vote-getters in the multi-candidate, non-partisan “jungle primary” that was held in conjunction with the November 3 general election. However, the limited public polling that has been conducted suggests that the two races are indeed running pretty much parallel with one another — that, in fact, Warnock may be doing slightly better against Loeffler than Ossoff is against Perdue.

This is not to suggest that the Democrats are on an easy glide path toward certain victory. President-elect Joe Biden had piled up a mail and early vote advantage over Trump of nearly 230,000 votes here in Georgia — and nearly saw it wiped out when Trump ran up a 220,000-vote margin on election day. But it does seem that the Democrats have muscled up in a couple of key areas that could make the difference on January 5.

Probably the most significant foundational advantage the Democrats can currently claim is in voter turnout. Through the most recent county-level early voting data reported by georgiavotes.com, the 28 counties that sided with Ossoff in the general election — all the state’s heavily populated urban counties and a smattering of heavily black rural counties — were turning out a higher percentage of registered voters than the 131 mostly rural counties that went for Perdue. As of Sunday’s data, 29 percent of registered voters in the Ossoff counties had already voted in person or by mail versus 26.8 percent in the Perdue counties — an advantage of more than two points in a category historically dominated by Republicans. More than 30 percent of registered voters have already voted in such Metro Atlanta behemoths as Fulton, Gwinnett, DeKalb, Douglas and Rockdale counties.

Perdue, meanwhile, is having to rely on the state’s rural counties, and so far they have been falling further and further behind over the course of the early voting process. A couple of clusters a dependable Republican counties — Oconee, Greene, Morgan and Putnam in just east of Metro Atlanta and Union, Towns and Rabun on the North Carolina line — are already in the high 30s and, in a couple of cases, the low 40s. But the vast majority of counties that supported Perdue in the general election are still lagging badly behind in the mid- and even low-20s (those in pale pink on the map at left).

The Democrats’ apparent turnout lead comes on top of a significant — and growing — advantage in the sheer number of registered voters in the Ossoff counties versus the Perdue counties. For the general election, the Ossoff counties were already home to more voters — 3.91 million versus 3.32 million for Perdue — and the Ossoff counties padded their advantage by more than 50,000 new registered voters between the general election and the deadline for runoff registration. For the runoff, the Ossoff counties now have 4.07 million registered voters to the Perdue counties’ 3.42 million — an advantage of nearly nine percentage points.

The largest recent poll available — a SurveyUSA poll conducted just before Christmas for WXIA-TV — aligned with TIGC’s analysis of the early voting data in several ways, including especially indications that fervent pro-Trump rural voters may not come back to the polls to support the incumbent Republican senators. The SurveyUSA poll of 691 Georgia registered voters included a battery of questions focused on whether or not they actually intended to vote in the runoff and found that about 11 percent planned to stay home.

That cohort of avowed non-voters included some Democrats and independents but was made up more heavily of Republicans who supported President Trump, and it was clear they had heard his complaints about the election being rigged against him. Fully 42 percent of the rural GOP voters who planned not to vote said their decision was based on a belief that “the voting process is rigged.” Further, the SurveyUSA poll found that the number of Atlanta area voters who planned not to vote in the runoff was about half the percentage in northwestern and southeastern parts of the state (about three percent in Atlanta versus six and five percent, respectively, in in SurveyUSA’s northwestern and southeastern regions.)

This SurveyUSA finding of dampened enthusiasm among Trump supporters squares with the picture emerging from the early voting data so far, including the map above of the Perdue counties. In addition, georgiareports.com’s latest slicing of the early voting data by congressional district underscores the picture that emerged from the county-level analysis discussed above: the five Metro Atlanta congressional districts held by Democrats are turning out at significantly higher levels than those held by Republicans. For those five Democratic-held districts, the turnout rate as of Sunday was 31.3 percent, higher by several points than any of the state’s Republican-held district. Indeed, it was exactly 10 points higher than the turnout than for Georgia’s 14th congressional district in the northwestern corner of the state, which was just won by Qanon devotee Margaret Taylor Greene and was one of the last places in the state where Trump personally campaigned.

With a full week of early voting and the January 5 runoff still to go, these numbers could of course change. Indeed, TIGC’s vote-share analysis and projections could simply turn out to be wrong. If so, however, that would represent a dramatic departure from voting patterns and trends that have been developing and firming up over the past decade or so of election cycles. And, while few obvious straws in the wind seem to be blowing the GOP’s way right now, it needs to be said that Ossoff and Warnock still have strategic soft spots as well: they are, in particular, still not getting the vote production they need out of heavily black urban counties like Dougherty (18.8 percent); Chatham (19.7 percent); Richmond (21.5 percent); Bibb (24.2 percent); Muscogee (24.6 percent), and Clayton (25.9 percent).

Still, it seems likely Ossoff and Warnock will head into the runoff with a lead in the early and mail votes. Whether it will be sufficient to withstand the traditional Republican election day turnout advantage remains to be seen, and is the question that will grip the state — and much of the nation — for the next 10 days.

(c) copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2020