Georgia's Very Own Megathread!

[Adam Griffin]

TROLOLOLOLOL

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Adam Griffin]

Full-sized image



Counties where Carter performed at or above statewide average among whites:



#1 Dekalb
#1 Clayton
#3 Clarke
#4 Fulton
#5 Hancock
#6 Chattooga
#7 Muscogee
#8 Chatham
#8 Chattahooche
#8 Stewart
#8 Macon
#12 Bibb
#12 Richmond
#12 Dougherty
#12 Talbot
#16 Clay
#16 Rockdale
#18 Floyd
#18 Murray
#18 Sumter
#21 Baldwin
#21 Cobb
#21 Liberty
#21 Telfair
#25 Dade
#25 Oconee
#25 Quitman
#25 Towns
#25 Walker
#25 Whitfield

[IceSpear]

I bet that county where Carter only got 7% is just a wonderful place.

[Adam Griffin]

I bet that county where Carter only got 7% is just a wonderful place.

Yeah, that's Walton County - BK lives near there, so he can probably tell us all about it. I've never had an excuse to go to that county (who would?), but looking at the area, it strikes me geographically as a place where the worst of rubery would fuse with awful transplant conservative cookie-cutter subdivision mentality, thanks to the outward growth of the metro.


Now, I've taken my old 2012 Obama performance map among whites by county and put it alongside the Carter 2014 map to show the difference.

It's amazing that despite how much better Carter did among whites in many of these counties compared to Obama's 2012 showing, he still received the same percentage of the overall vote. Even small drop-offs in minority turnout in GA have huge effects, and that's before we even count the documented drop-off of non-white support for Democrats in the midterm. All in all, it was enough to reduce Carter from potentially getting 48% of the statewide vote (in a 2012-style turnout/support scenario with whites giving 23%) to getting 45% of the statewide (actual).

An even more interesting comparison might be Obama 2008/Carter 2014 (since both received 23% statewide in exit polling). Here is the comparison of each county in the two scenarios, showing who did better among whites and by how many points:



And the actual side-by-side:

Full-sized image

[Barnes]

That's hilarious that Carter only got 19% of the white vote in Newton and still carried the county!  I'm proud to say that I was among that 19%, however.

[Adam Griffin]

I had been waiting for awhile to make this map, but forgot post-election to actually do it - until now! Here's a gubernatorial swing map comparing 2002 and 2014. Seeing as how 2002 was considered the "death knell" election for Georgia Democrats and 2014 was/is considered the beginning of a re-surging DPG, comparing these two years is arguably very relevant/prudent.



Go go Whitfield!

I'm assuming that the cluster of central GA counties swinging Democratic is almost exclusively due to the lack of a native son factor in 2014 (Sonny Perdue was from Houston County), but some of those counties are bit far from Bonaire. It could also be intensified to a degree by the fact that Carter home turf is immediately SW of the cluster (Sumter County; though Sumter itself did not swing to Carter).

[Barnes]

You really should be proud of your work up there, Adam!

The cluster of Democratic swing at the Atlanta Metro is what got us all so hopeful for this election, I suppose, but the effect that it had was (at least, temporarily) mitigated by the enormous swings to the Republicans throughout most of the rest of the state.

[Bacon King]

Yeah, that's Walton County - BK lives near there, so he can probably tell us all about it. I've never had an excuse to go to that county (who would?)

growing up, I had reasons to go to Walton County- we played them in sports, and I had some friends down that way (and during high school dated girls from Loganville and Monroe)

You must be logged in to read this quote.

This is essentially correct, but Walton County is basically the worst of the Atlanta suburbs by far.

Fun facts about Walton County!

1. Jody Hice, America's worst Congressman, was the pastor of their largest Baptist Church
2. McMansion hellhole suburbia is everywhere, especially around Loganville.
3. The County Seat of Monroe is possibly the most segregated community I've ever been to, and the only place I know of where that "wrong side of the tracks" thing is still 100% true. The whites live in the south of town, the blacks in the north, no exceptions. And the locals literally call the north of town "Monkey-roe"
4. The local police actually drive around in these:



5. This is completely anecdotal, but the people I knew from down there were either mega jesus freaks, or living in outright hedonism- no middle ground. I can elaborate on this, kind of hard to explain, but it was a consistent trend I noticed from everyone I knew from the area.

[Adam Griffin]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Adam Griffin]

Sharing here:

It's amazing how as recently as the early 2000s, guys like Max Cleland, Zell Miller, and Roy Barnes strode across Georgia politics like colossi. It must have been multiracial coalitions of whites and blacks that put these men into power. Impossible to imagine today. In many ways, the South has been regressing since the 1990s, similarly to how it regressed during post-Reconstruction in 1873-1908.

Quite remarkable how quickly it all shifted, but it was long overdue, to be fair. Let's take a look at election results and compare them to turnout by race in GA over the cycles in order to see the makeup of the coalition.

% of candidate's voters that were white, 1996:
Clinton 56% (lost)
Cleland 59% (won)

% of candidate's voters that were white, 1998:
Barnes: 59% (won)
Coles: 48% (lost)

% of candidate's voters that were white, 2000:
Gore: 49% (lost)
Miller: 62% (won)

% of candidate's voters that were white, 2002:
Barnes: 54% (lost)
Cleland: 53% (lost)

% of candidate's voters that were white, 2004:
Kerry: 45% (lost)
Majette: 39% (lost)

(the blue/pink line roughly indicates what percentage of Democratic candidate's electorate needed to be white in order to win)

So basically, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the Democratic coalition in Georgia went from 60% white to 45% white. It's now about 35% white and yet pulling roughly the same statewide numbers as when Barnes and Cleland lost in 2002 (which tells you how rapid the demographic shift has been here).

[Miles]

Kingston is going to K Street, so I guess its unlikely he wants to run for anything else:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

[Maxwell]

Kingston is going to K Street, so I guess its unlikely he wants to run for anything else:

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Boy that guy ran a weak primary campaign. He was, for all intents and purposes, favored in the run off, got all of the endorsements, while Perdue blew his load over the Chamber of Commerce, and still lost.

[Miles]

Interesting how Perdue and Kingston had much different dynamics going for them:

Perdue- Best all arounder. Was in either first or second place in every CD.
Kingston- Most concentrated strength. Outside of the four southernmost CDs, he didn't break 20% in any other.

[Miles]

Perdue swept 10 (almost 11) districts, but wasn't over 60% in any of them:

[Attorney General & Senator Dwarven Dragon]

Gingrey coming in third in his own congressional district. LOLOLOLOL

[Adam Griffin]

Gingrey coming in third in his own congressional district. LOLOLOLOL

To be fair, a good chunk of his pre-2012 CD is now in GA-14, which was his best CD.

[Adam Griffin]

WAKE UP, YOU SILLY THREAD

Was just doing some thinking about how much Georgia has changed, and thought I'd illustrate with a hypothetical (being, "what if Clinton only did as well as John Kerry among all races, and not just blacks?"):

2004...
Kerry got 23-24% among whites
Kerry got 88% among blacks
Kerry got 43% (!?!) among latinos
Kerry got an unknown number among asians/other voters (let's assume 50%)
This led to Kerry receiving 41.34% of the vote

2016...
Clinton gets 23-24% among whites
Clinton gets 88% among blacks
Clinton gets 43% among latinos
Clinton gets 50% among asians/other voters
This leads to Clinton receiving 46.38% of the vote

I maintain - especially in retrospect - that the DNC picked the wrong state (NC) to invest in in 2008. When you look at 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections with respect to Democratic performance between GA & NC, there's evidence that they picked the wrong one.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Hmm...interesting.  Controlling for that, it shows how Georgia is becoming more and more Democratic in concrete terms.

[Ebsy]

Many of the new whites are also latinos. White alone is down to 54.8%.

[Skill and Chance]

WAKE UP, YOU SILLY THREAD

Was just doing some thinking about how much Georgia has changed, and thought I'd illustrate with a hypothetical (being, "what if Clinton only did as well as John Kerry among all races, and not just blacks?"):

2004...
Kerry got 23-24% among whites
Kerry got 88% among blacks
Kerry got 43% (!?!) among latinos
Kerry got an unknown number among asians/other voters (let's assume 50%)
This led to Kerry receiving 41.34% of the vote

2016...
Clinton gets 23-24% among whites
Clinton gets 88% among blacks
Clinton gets 43% among latinos
Clinton gets 50% among asians/other voters
This leads to Clinton receiving 46.38% of the vote

I maintain - especially in retrospect - that the DNC picked the wrong state (NC) to invest in in 2008. When you look at 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections with respect to Democratic performance between GA & NC, there's evidence that they picked the wrong one.

Fascinating thought there.  I guess it really comes down to three things:

1.  Could Jim Martin have been pulled over the line by the Obama campaign in GA?  Would Elizabeth Dole's Sunday school teacher = atheist meltdown have given the Democrats a 6 year rental in NC regardless of investment there?
2. Would Gwinnett and Cobb, combined with better margins in the already Dem parts of Atlanta flip the state alone?  I didn't appreciate the degree of rural dependence for a Dem path to victory in NC until recently, but it will seriously hurt them for some time.
3. GA redistricting can be vetoed while NC can't.  Would there have been a serious chance of electing Barnes in 2010 with sufficient 2008 investment?  If a Democrat can get elected governor in 2018, is there a reasonable path to holding Republicans under 2/3rds in the legislature for 2021?

[Adam Griffin]

*BUMP*

Tonight there is a special election for House District 80 in Brookhaven. Formerly held by Mike Jacobs, this is perhaps the softest district in the state for Republicans. Taylor Bennett, the D challenger, came in first in the four-way run-off (with about 37% of the vote) in the special election. What has changed since then is the fact that the nuttiest candidate of the three Rs got the nomination.

If Bennett manages to pull this fiscally-conservative but socially-liberal district (the R candidate is a bit of a wacko, despite being Mayor of Brookhaven) away from the R column, then GAGOP loses its supermajority in the House and the Fulton County delegation reverts to being majority-D again (Fulton county government because of its size and a variety of other factors is heavily constrained at the state level by how the majority of state house reps approve or disapprove various actions made at the county level that they are allowed to weigh in on).

In short, it'd be really big if this Democrat pulls out a win. I'm not really doing the overall campaign/story justice here and I should have been posting about this sooner, but oh well.

http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/56407/153665/en/summary.html

[windjammer]

This Pastor May Run For The Senate -- And Help Turn Georgia Blue

I hope he will run honestly.

-----------------------
House district 80: Obama carried this district by 4 in 2008, he lost this district by 13 points in 2012. He will likely fail .

[Barnes]

Should be an interesting race tonight!  The DeKalb GOP is severely divided and the Republican who lost in the first round, Catherine Barnard, has refused to support either candidate.

The Republican is obviously favored, but in a perfect storm after all...

[Barnes]

Here is a nice write-up by the AJC on the background of tonight's race. 

[Barnes]

Well counting is going very slowly, although with low turnout special elections (especially ones in the summer) you can never tell how many more votes are to come.

Anyway, here's what the vote looks like so far.

T. Bennett (Dem)     325     63%

J.M. Davis (Rep)       191     37%