Georgia's Very Own Megathread!

[Adam Griffin]

Update: as of Friday, 139,866 AIP/ABM ballots have been cast or requested (via mail) in Georgia:

Votes	%	Party
71436	51.07	Republican
64515	46.12	Democratic
3915	2.81	Non-Partisan

And comparisons to previous primary composition:

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[GeorgiaModerate]

Good article on the Democratic gubernatorial primary from Jim Galloway of the AJC: https://politics.myajc.com/blog/politics/the-shifting-etiquette-scorched-earth-democratic-campaign-for-governor/NPXD3GnWzrmqTi5b32rv6K/.  Includes these tidbits for the early vote tea leaf readers:

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[scutosaurus]

How is Brian Kemp a real person

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q1cfjh6VfE

[Adam Griffin]

Good article on the Democratic gubernatorial primary from Jim Galloway of the AJC: https://politics.myajc.com/blog/politics/the-shifting-etiquette-scorched-earth-democratic-campaign-for-governor/NPXD3GnWzrmqTi5b32rv6K/.  Includes these tidbits for the early vote tea leaf readers:

This is what I've been thinking might happen:

Even if they succeed at increasing black turnout significantly, there's another problem: suburban ATL voters. I don't think anybody is under the impression that the huge swings in the metro in 2016 came from black voters. Since the election, suburbia has only soured on Trump even more. It's very possible that hordes of white and non-white, non-black voters pour into the Democratic primary for the first time, cancelling out (and maybe even then some) any gains in black voters.

Until/unless proven otherwise, I remain highly skeptical that the presence of a black state-level candidate will dramatically increase black turnout or support...

...let's not forget that almost all of the (black) "low-hanging fruit" so to speak were activated/engaged in 2008 and 2012 (and those voters largely continued to participate in 2010 and 2014, at least proportionately speaking), and there will also likely be a surge of interest in voting among non-black Democrats, moderates and independents as well.

Just in the 6th alone, the amount of bombardment from the special election turned even low-propensity voters out; as such, if Democrats were able to activate them, then getting them to vote in a midterm primary is a very attainable goal seeing as how they're already stirred up (much like how black voters continued to participate in substantially larger numbers post-2008). It seems to be having an effect, along with the increased anti-Trump sentiment...and I imagine even among the lower-propensity voters in this CD, a huge portion are non-black.

I also have a friend who's working on the ground in the 7th, and he says there is a huge surge in Asian-American participation that is going to manifest in this contest. While he doesn't know for sure one way or another, his gut feeling is that they'll break heavily for Evans in the primary.

[Rookie Yinzer]

Isn’t the 7th CD less white than the 6th? I wonder if that could theoretically flip before the 6th. These Latino and Asian non-voters getting involved as well as Trump helping to accelerate civically engaged Asians’ shift to the Democratic Party could do it.

Rooting for Carolyn Bordeaux and Bobby Kaple in their respective primaries.

[Podgy the Bear]

According to the latest numbers, the 6th district is 61% white, the 7th is 46% white.

Both districts are "browning" rapidly.  But the influx of Asians, Hispanics, and non-AA blacks means a good while before they will vote in large numbers--and not necessarily in a homogeneous manner.

That said, the big jump in Democratic primary voters in the 6th/7th/11th districts suggest a competitive race in November.  I would have to agree with the previous poster that these voters are primarily breaking for Evans.  She's running some solid ads right now.

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

I think Abrams will easily win. Most primary voters are black, and from the one poll we've seen so far, Abrams is getting just as many white people as evans.

60-40 Abrams

[OneJ]

For the Dem primary, I predict a 65-35 win for Abrams.

[Rookie Yinzer]

Not sure when the vote comes in for Georgia north of 285 but if Evans is not utterly obliterating Abrams there, then the race is an Abrams routing against Evans. I believe Georgia, south of Macon will be heavily for Abrams so Evans needs huge victories up north, and obviously to win some big Metro ATL counties (especially Cobb) outright.

[GeorgiaModerate]

I also have a friend who's working on the ground in the 7th, and he says there is a huge surge in Asian-American participation that is going to manifest in this contest. While he doesn't know for sure one way or another, his gut feeling is that they'll break heavily for Evans in the primary.

I assume this is due to the presence of David Kim and Ethan Pham in the Congressional race?  I was driving through Gwinnett this morning and was struck by the number of Kim signs.

[Adam Griffin]

Well, I was going to fetch the registration numbers by race and by CD, but the new SoS spreadsheet format is F[INKS]D on multiple levels and I frankly don't have the patience to short through each precinct and each group by race and by gender and then rearrange them into a format that'll work. But I'll just note (and it has already been said) that population =/= voters, especially in the north ATL burbs. Places that are nominally majority-minority (that aren't fueled heavily by black electorates) might still be 70% white or more come primary day - and could even be majority-white in the Democratic primary.

I also have a friend who's working on the ground in the 7th, and he says there is a huge surge in Asian-American participation that is going to manifest in this contest. While he doesn't know for sure one way or another, his gut feeling is that they'll break heavily for Evans in the primary.

I assume this is due to the presence of David Kim and Ethan Pham in the Congressional race?  I was driving through Gwinnett this morning and was struck by the number of Kim signs.

Yep.

[Adam Griffin]

Isn’t the 7th CD less white than the 6th? I wonder if that could theoretically flip before the 6th.

In theory/assuming they were starting with the same infrastructure, yep. I actually had pegged the 7th as more opportune than the 6th for Dems prior to the special election last year. I'm betting that had the same circumstances unfolded in the 7th, a Democrat would have won.

However and at this point, the 6th has a ton of residual Democratic ground-game infrastructure spread throughout in the form of groups that mobilized on behalf of Ossoff, so I'd be surprised if the 7th could frog-leap the 6th now.

[Blair]

I know there's probably an answer somewhere else on the thread, but I'll ask anyway.

I read a lot of the 'old democratic' machine in Georgia is supporting Stacey Evans- is there any reason why they favour her? Abrams seems like a much better candidate based on what I've seen of the two.

[Adam Griffin]

BTW, I went back and looked at racial composition of the 2014 primary; I'm wondering where I got the impression that the electorate was less black than it was (perhaps from presidential primaries, which tend to be <60% black)? Anyway, it was 65% black, 29% white and 6% other in 2014. This may have been at least partially due to a siphoning effect in more heavily-GOP counties; since there were no major contested races on the Democratic side, more Democrats opted to pull a GOP ballot to vote for the least crazy GE alternative in their local and statewide races.

Another tidbit I find interesting (and something I'll start including in my daily updates) is the percentage of ballots cast/requested relative to 2014's total vote: currently, it stands at 18% for Dems (64k so far; 353k in 2014). While it may have been different for the primary in '14 (don't want to mix-up figures again), usually, around half of the vote in a statewide contest is cast early. We've been seeing a steady stream of about 7k additional Dem voters per day over the past week, and early voting tends to pick up in the final week...but this seems low if anything.

If the original info in the article saying turnout was much higher was from last Wednesday (i.e. when there were only 20k votes), the situation may have changed drastically since then.

[Canis]

I know there's probably an answer somewhere else on the thread, but I'll ask anyway.

I read a lot of the 'old democratic' machine in Georgia is supporting Stacey Evans- is there any reason why they favour her? Abrams seems like a much better candidate based on what I've seen of the two.

from what I heard they think its safer to nominate a white woman as they fear a racial bias could defeat Abrams or something

[Adam Griffin]

I know there's probably an answer somewhere else on the thread, but I'll ask anyway.

I read a lot of the 'old democratic' machine in Georgia is supporting Stacey Evans- is there any reason why they favour her? Abrams seems like a much better candidate based on what I've seen of the two.

Some of it is racial. However, it's important to remember that each segment of the Georgia Democratic apparatus has wildly different skewings. For instance, the legislative caucus is 80% black, while the state and county committee structures are closer to 50/50; the executive committee is majority-white. From what I can tell, though, the levels of support for Abrams/Evans among these three groups do not sync up with their racial compositions: in fact, Evans' strongest support may be coming from the blackest of those three groups.

Some of it is personal. I'm not close enough to the core of the state's Democratic politics on a regular enough basis to truly understand (nor motivated enough quite frankly to ask) the full story behind why so many people - male and female; white and black - who served with Abrams don't like her, but they don't. It's pretty shocking that the most recent Minority Leader is losing a majority of her caucus' support to a relative back-bencher.

Some of it is strategic. There are many people across the socioeconomic spectrum in the state party who simply don't believe that a black female can win statewide, when demographic groups who have objectively performed better in the past still haven't pulled it off. These kinds of battles are going to become even fiercer over the next few cycles, especially since it's not enough to win as a Democrat in GA: you gotta win by at least 2-3 points to clear the 50%+1 requirement and avoid a run-off (which is a guarantee loss for the Democrat).

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Why is a runoff a guaranteed loss?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Why is a runoff a guaranteed loss?

They have historically lost them. One of the major reasons would be African-American turnout dropping off post general election.

[Adam Griffin]

Why is a runoff a guaranteed loss?

Low-turnout contests in heavily-minority jurisdictions tend to result in an over-representation of whites due to non-whites not showing up to the polls - and that's almost always true in GA.

Besides the 1992/2008 Senate run-offs and the fact that GA-6 showed the least improvement of the potentially competitive congressional races, look at the margins in the special elections for State House. Georgia is basically the only state (Connecticut is the other, but obvious conditions there are fueling the swing) where the average state legislative special election swing for the cycle has shifted to the GOP. There have actually been a couple of seats swing to the Democrats - in heavily-white areas. Elsewhere, the party has taken a pounding.

*Incomplete results; do not have data for Clinton margins in all special elections

[Holy Unifying Centrist]

Man, it's going to take forever for Georgia to be competitive on the state level. I see it being like Virginia, where it goes purple providentially way faster than locally because of the reliance on non-reliable voters (especially the younger people).

[Adam Griffin]

Man, it's going to take forever for Georgia to be competitive on the state level. I see it being like Virginia, where it goes purple providentially way faster than locally because of the reliance on non-reliable voters (especially the younger people).

And that bears pointing out: a significant component of the unreliability of non-white voters in Georgia is actually fueled by age more than race. It's particularly a big problem in the suburban parts of Atlanta, and it's also why Latino and Asian voters are so poorly represented across the country (citizenship also compounds that, of course).

For example, when Republican Janice Van Ness (who literally spelled her name "JaNice" on the ballot, presumably so black voters would think she's black) won the special election for SD 43 a couple of years back, she pulled off a 1-point win in a district Obama carried both times by 40 points. She lost the race in 2016 by - you guessed it - 40 points. How'd it happen? The over-65 cohort in that SE Metro ATL area is still majority-white by a good margin; under-65 is majority-black...and a significant share of that black population is under the age of 40. Guess who votes in low-turnout elections and who doesn't?

While there is still some discrepancy between voting propensity between black and white regardless of age, a huge segment of it is due to non-white voters of all backgrounds being younger on average than white voters - and in some parts of the state, the discrepancy in age is massive.

[Adam Griffin]

^^^ And FWIW, I think, to some degree, Democrats could break through at the state level (at least in statewide races) around the same time they break through in presidential contests - at least in terms of coming in first place. Obviously the presidential contest doesn't have the 50%+1 requirement (though there's nothing preventing it from being re-enacted; it actually was in effect for some time in the past century, though it never resulted in a presidential run-off).

I think a few pages back, you'll find my precinct-by-precinct GIF of Georgia presidential/gubernatorial results from 2002-2016. Anyway, if you look at it, GA basically oscillates between presidential and midterm in terms of which group (rural and white; urban and black) overperforms its baseline Democratic numbers. In midterms, Democrats tend to do better with white and rural voters than in presidential elections; in presidentials, Democrats tend to do better with black and urban voters than in midterms. You can clearly see various rural/white/Republican areas lighten up during midterms and urban/black/Democratic areas darken up during presidentials.

Unfortunately, there has never been a cycle where we could sync up both coalitions and get them to perform at their maximum. However, if urban and non-white support and turnout are maximized for a midterm, that added performance from white and rural voters might just be enough to tilt it. However, the latter group has not exactly demonstrated a propensity to "rebound" for statewide candidates who are black, so...it depends on who's the nominee as to whether that strategy can be pursued.


EDIT: here it is:

[henster]

Whatever happened to Thurbert Baker he was state AG and won easily statewide 3x times. He ran and lost to Barnes in the primary in 2010, but he seems like he'd be a better candidate than Abrams right now.

[Adam Griffin]

Whatever happened to Thurbert Baker he was state AG and won easily statewide 3x times. He ran and lost to Barnes in the primary in 2010, but he seems like he'd be a better candidate than Abrams right now.

He pretty much dropped off the map after his 2010 gubernatorial campaign. He probably would be a better choice electorally-speaking if only because he would negate one of the potential hold-back factors (i.e. he's a male), but I highly doubt he could win a contested primary: as I recall, he was a fairly conservative guy on a variety of issues. I imagine he'd be a good Governor, though.

He was able to win easily once in office, but it's worth pointing out that he was appointed by Zell and enjoyed de-facto incumbency on the ballot at a time (1998) when being a Democrat statewide still was a winning bet. I'd actually be curious as to how the campaign was waged that year: with far less media and campaigning, I wonder what percentage of white Democrats even knew he was black? Was his picture on campaign materials, etc? Even if most people knew, the 1990s were a special time in GA where - as far as Democratic voters were concerned - if you managed to get the nomination, you were likely going to get the votes irrespective of ideology or race.

Of course, Mike Thurmond (elected alongside Baker in 1998) enjoys the distinction of being the only black person to hold statewide row office in GA while being duly nominated and elected to that office without appointment...but his Senate campaign was a disaster due to the aforementioned racial bias combining with the nationalizing of a contest for federal office and the fact that it was just a bad campaign in general (would've had to been on the ground then to understand).

[Rookie Yinzer]

I know there's probably an answer somewhere else on the thread, but I'll ask anyway.

I read a lot of the 'old democratic' machine in Georgia is supporting Stacey Evans- is there any reason why they favour her? Abrams seems like a much better candidate based on what I've seen of the two.

They don't see a path without converting Trump/GOP voters and Abrams has been very open about not courting them. She is also a black woman, and many of them do not believe she will win statewide. I was one of those people, but a series of events changed my perspective.

I do think it's telling that the vast majority of the Black Legislative Caucus did not endorse her, and in addition to that chose some guy whose name I can't even remember to be the Minority Leader instead of Abrams' chosen successor Minority Whip Carolyn Hugley. Some of her opposition from her former colleagues seems to be more personal instead of a "logical" rejection of her candidacy due to the uphill battle she'll face as a black woman.