I'm very curious to see the county map for this race. It's gonna be weird. Right now, I have Warnock winning the counties in red (Abrams '18, Fayette, the expanded black belt, and a few smaller metros.) That said, I have absolutely no idea how the blue counties are going to go except for some vague sense Collins will overperform in his Northeast Georgia district and Loeffler might do best in the rest of the Atlanta exurbs. South Georgia is a big question mark so far as I'm concerned. What are your thoughts?
I actually think Collins will win the exurbs for the most part, with Loeffler winning the rurals (other than the NE). Loeffler has aggressively positioned herself to the right of Collins, with Collins portraying himself as the clean, upright candidate. Of course, depending on the margin between the two, Loeffler could just win everything outside of NE Georgia.
The best analogy right now is the 2019 Louisiana Governors race. Warnock is somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, and his Republican opposition is dueling in the 20s. This absolutely means that Warnock will carry a ton of Republican counties in the first round on pluralities thanks to favorable vote splits. Now I'm not sure where Warnock will see more plurality victories, but he will get it. One point of view suggests that the northern subrubs and exurbs are moving towards the Dems so there are enough Blue voters to see Warnock sneak through on 38% pluralities. The other line of thought sees all the 40% AA counties that vote red in the south of the state and expects them to flip because of vote splits.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/us/elections/results-louisiana-governor-primary-election.html
It looks like he already has nearly every county where Clinton got over 35% of the vote going to Warnock. Even if the split between Loeffler and Collins is pretty even statewide, it's going to be very difficult for Warnock to win counties where Clinton was in the low 30s, and all but impossible in places where she was below 30.
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