GA-SEN 2020 Class II Megathread (Perdue inc.)

[Bidenworth2020]

Someone good like Stacey Evans would have beaten Kemp. Still held the same numbers everywhere, but do better in the rural areas to barely make it over the top. Abrams is a toxic fit for rural GA, did worse than Hillary there, sad!

Ever heard of something called turnout?

[Bidenworth2020]

Georgia senator says he's not worried about his state losing film business over abortion ban


https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/13/us/georgia-senator-abortion-ban-film-business-trnd/index.html

Right. Because the white people from California and the working class black people who benefit from the industry do not vote Republican. The GOP is garbage.

I mentioned in the other thread that I heard Tomlinson today. I definitely considered her the best of the "second tier" but she is really freaking good. A candidate on par with Stacey Abrams. She answered every question directly and didn't try to squirm out of anything. I'm all in.

You think she can organize like Abrams?

[Bidenworth2020]

this  guy looks cool but he would be smacked in a general, not to mention the primary

[Bidenworth2020]

Teresa Tomlinson's rural constituency director sent this stupid ass tweet. #TeamAbrams swooped in to correct the record.



Uh... all Dems going forward better realize Abrams has set the standard for the next generation. You can't run on "not ignoring communities Democrats have abandoned" when Abrams did it all and then some! In my opinion, rural South GA took precedence over Metro Atlanta in her campaign and that's not a criticism. That's how passionate she was about engaging those voters.

Why do you think she did so bad in these areas then (worse than Hillary!)

[Bidenworth2020]

Terry probably have sh-t fundraising in Q4.

Ossoff is probably going to win the primary outright. Tomlinson just isn't delivering.

I think Warnock is going to carry the Senate ticket anyway so I don't care who it is at this point.

Thats a shame, I think the ATL/outstate combo would have played well.

[Bidenworth2020]

Perdue will win 55-44.

Only way Perdue wins by 10 is if Trump wins GA by 7-8. Barring major scandals (I don't think insider trading qualifies in GA, frankly) he won't outperform Trump by more than 2-3 points.

On the flip side, do you buy into the "Georgia is a tossup in 2020" narrative?

[Bidenworth2020]

Perdue will win 55-44.

Only way Perdue wins by 10 is if Trump wins GA by 7-8. Barring major scandals (I don't think insider trading qualifies in GA, frankly) he won't outperform Trump by more than 2-3 points.

On the flip side, do you buy into the "Georgia is a tossup in 2020" narrative?

Tossup, no. Competitive, yes. I'll call it Lean R - meaning that I expect Trump to win the state, but would not be surprised if Biden takes it as part of a significant overall win.

One thing I am curious about is how he does in rural areas compared to Abrams-- she did significantly worse than even Hillary did in rural areas. Can Biden do a bit better here, or are the trends too strong? If he can, that could make a big difference in a close race.

[Bidenworth2020]

Perdue will win 55-44.

Only way Perdue wins by 10 is if Trump wins GA by 7-8. Barring major scandals (I don't think insider trading qualifies in GA, frankly) he won't outperform Trump by more than 2-3 points.

On the flip side, do you buy into the "Georgia is a tossup in 2020" narrative?

Tossup, no. Competitive, yes. I'll call it Lean R - meaning that I expect Trump to win the state, but would not be surprised if Biden takes it as part of a significant overall win.

One thing I am curious about is how he does in rural areas compared to Abrams-- she did significantly worse than even Hillary did in rural areas. Can Biden do a bit better here, or are the trends too strong? If he can, that could make a big difference in a close race.

Margin-wise, Biden will in all likelihood do worse than Clinton in several dozen counties. This will be due primarily to a loss of (black) population, but trends will play a minor role as well. Of course, all of these counties combined probably won't be more than 10-15% of the state's vote, and quite a number of them will only be tiny swings.

I don't see Biden doing worse than Clinton in as many places as Clinton did worse than Obama (or Abrams worse than Carter). Setting aside the counties where we are losing both population and a disproportionate number of Democratic voters, there is a hard mathematical floor in many places we're now hitting. There's still varying amounts of room for loss in many counties, but in over a third of GA's counties, we had white voters in 2018 voting GOP at higher percentages than black voters voting Democratic.

To Abrams' credit, while it's true she did consistently worse than Clinton in the vast majority of counties, it was only by 1-2 points in most places. You could argue that a favorable Democratic midterm makes that quite embarrassing, but you can also argue that an inelastic state where strong trends of polarization have been raging mitigated any bounce in rural areas. If you want to criticize Abrams performance in rural GA, it'd be much better to compare her performance to Carter's in 2014 than Clinton's in 2016. Abrams lost 3 points in the statewide margin from the counties where she did worse than Carter; enough to cost her the Governorship and mirror-reverse the actual result (50.2% Abrams, 48.8% Kemp).

The reason I personally am hesitant to make that comparison is because Carter's performance in those areas was simply unattainable. Perhaps it was due to the Carter name, but regardless, there was never a chance that Abrams would be able to keep Kemp under 70% in most of Southwest Georgia like Carter did. One comparison that might be more interesting, although also outdated, would be 2012 President -> 2018 Governor.

[Bidenworth2020]

The reason I personally am hesitant to make that comparison is because Carter's performance in those areas was simply unattainable. Perhaps it was due to the Carter name, but regardless, there was never a chance that Abrams would be able to keep Kemp under 70% in most of Southwest Georgia like Carter did. One comparison that might be more interesting, although also outdated, would be 2012 President -> 2018 Governor.

But SW GA is like...nothing. Take everything west of I-75 and south of the Fall Line and you're talking about 6% of population (probably more like 5% of voters). Even when considering 2014/18 performance, Abrams didn't implode that badly there among white voters (the only apt comparison, given black population there was & is evaporating; can't win what doesn't exist): it was basically everywhere else in rural GA where she truly bombed in raw votes (SE GA, North GA, etc). Those places weren't inherently "loyal" to Carter because of his name in the way that a place like SW GA would've been.

Obviously her holding all of Carter's performance in these places wasn't possible - it's an illustration of how these places can still rat-f[inks]k Democrats despite so many in the party saying for the past 15 years that we've finally reached the bottom after every single election. It was a three-pronged set of losses with regard to her candidacy (in comparison to Carter's) in rural areas: one because of trends (unavoidable), one because she was a black woman (unavoidable in her personal circumstance, but not unavoidable for Democrats in general) and one because she went out of her way to talk about guns, Confederate monuments and other cultural claptrap that didn't motivate a single person to show up for her, but surely turned some likely voters against her (while galvanizing GOP turnout to boot).

Sorry, I meant to refer to South Georgia, basically everything south of the black belt sans Savannah. Anyway, Biden is able to counteract at least one of these factors (white man) and potentially another (depends on what Biden focuses his campaign on, though absurdly high rural turnout for Trump is basically a given). Anyway, even if he does this, it is only about 30% of the state. I am more curious about whether Abrams' performance in urban areas, and more specifically the ATL metro, is more of a high point or mid point for democrats. Is Abrams' ground game simply too strong to replicate? Or will Biden be able to turn out a lot of those low propensity black and Hispanic voters who probably had not voted for years, if ever.