Georgia's Very Own Megathread!

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All of a sudden there's a real logjam at the top for Georgia Democrats: the next time that someone new will be able to run for governor or Senate is 2026 at earliest, and probably later than that. Secretary of State is the highest-profile office available, and I wonder if it would have any appeal to someone like Jen Jordan, a rising star suddenly without anywhere to rise.

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Vernon Jones is a clown and he'd go nowhere in a Georgia GOP primary for obvious reasons (hint: it starts with an r, and ends in -ace), especially since North Georgia white people, who are a significant chunk of said primary electorate, are extremely racist.

It's true that Vernon Jones is a clown and that he has no chance in a Republican primary, but it's not because he's black. If Herschel Walker decides to run for US Senate this year he'll win the Republican nomination easily.

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At the rally in GA today Trump apparently said Stacy Abrams would be a better governor for the state than Brian Kemp.

He can say that if he likes, but the fact remains that there's not yet a more credible opposition candidate to Brian Kemp than Vernon Jones, and one imagines there's a reason that Jones hasn't yet received the laying on of hands. Maybe David Perdue will see fit to run, but otherwise I don't know whom it could be.

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Key word: former GOP legislator.

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Hopefully Perdue running will make people shut up about Vernon Jones. Kemp has a lot of allies in the Republican Party (it's worth considering how many county Republican organizations didn't censure him because of the work of those allies), but the Kemp/Cagle primary in 2018 was resolved in Kemp's favor thanks to an intervention from the big man upstairs, and Kemp will never get that this time. It's hard to see his path to winning.

As for the general election, it's possible that Kemp would do poorly in a general election just because Republican voters would stay home, but generally speaking I don't expect candidate quality to matter much. Georgia elections are generic R against generic D. People kept talking about how awful a candidate Kelly Loeffler was and how poorly her campaign went, and she did exactly the same as great candidate David Perdue.

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The cleavage here is going to be the state/county GOP organization (Kemp) vs Trump surrogates and aligned national media (Perdue.)  I'll rate the primary as toss-up/Tilt Kemp to start. 

The issue that I see with this assessment is that Kemp doesn't have enough of the Republican organization behind him. He has a lot of allies, which is why he's not going to go quietly, but the Georgia Republican Party is not a united organization. The people who stood behind Cagle (and there are an awful lot of those) are organization men too, and they're not going to help Kemp. The Perdue-aligned group here isn't just a band of outsiders parachuting in.

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Question:

Could Kemp having an embarrassing foil in the form of Perdue in this primary be helping him among centrist GE voters?

He looks sane compared to frothing Perdue

I don't expect it to matter. November is a long way away and there's plenty of time for the candidates to define each other; I don't expect this to stick in voters' memories. The last two election cycles in Georgia have effectively been Generic D and Generic R, and I don't expect that to change this time.

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https://twitter.com/AmoneyResists/status/1565134290366730242

This clip is from 2018.

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Placing a runoff threshold anywhere other than 50% defeats the purpose of holding a runoff. In theory I'm supportive of ranked choice voting, but I don't think that there's a single state in the country that I would trust to administer a ranked election in an efficient and timely manner. A two-round system oof already pretty good, so I don't think that the marginal improvement in the level of democracy of the outcome would justify the increase in delays.

Over the last two cycles, the existing runoff system has certainly attracted attention to Georgia. Traditionally this has been a good thing; this was the reasoning that led Nebraska and Maine to change the allocation of their electoral votes.