Will there be a GOP only runoff in Georgia?

[Adam Griffin]

Now that the Warnock campaign is visible in the media and Loeffer support seems really hollow, no chance (even before, it was small).

I do still think Lieberman will get relatively meaningful showings in some places outside of the ATL media market simply due to name recognition issues, but that's not going to be enough to create a R-vs-R situation. Oddly enough, I think Lieberman's range of possibilities is highly clustered; he'll either get less than 5% (which is much more likely) or >10%.

Absolute best-case scenario for Lieberman and/or the GOP would be:

Maybe something like 36% Warnock, 28% Collins, 20% Loeffer, 12% Lieberman in that specific scenario.

Increasingly, I'm thinking it'll be more like 43 Warnock, 34 Collins, 14 Loeffer, 3 Lieberman.

[Adam Griffin]

Just to elaborate from before: the Ossoff primary map was very illustrative in how the Democratic jungle primary vote (at least in relative terms/various under and over-performance patterns) will likely play out. In that case as well as this one, it'll be based entirely on name recognition/media market exposure inside & outside of Metro ATL voters, as well as how many angsty white high-info R-turned-Ds feel any bond to Lieberman. People who are relatively aware of the two top names but who aren't getting blasted with ads and media will disproportionately flip a proverbial coin when choosing a candidate.

Restricting that dynamic even further...remember that 60% of Abrams voters were here (which is only around two-thirds of the ATL media market). It's damn near impossible to imagine a scenario where Lieberman and Warnock are even relatively close in terms of vote share.

 

[Adam Griffin]

Just to elaborate from before: the Ossoff primary map was very illustrative in how the Democratic jungle primary vote (at least in relative terms/various under and over-performance patterns) will likely play out. In that case as well as this one, it'll be based entirely on name recognition/media market exposure inside & outside of Metro ATL voters, as well as how many angsty white high-info R-turned-Ds feel any bond to Lieberman. People who are relatively aware of the two top names but who aren't getting blasted with ads and media will disproportionately flip a proverbial coin when choosing a candidate.

Restricting that dynamic even further...remember that 60% of Abrams voters were here (which is only around two-thirds of the ATL media market). It's damn near impossible to imagine a scenario where Lieberman and Warnock are even relatively close in terms of vote share.

 

So it should be Warnock v Collins?

That's been the conventional wisdom the entire time, yes. While a smattering of public polls over the summer show Loeffer being anywhere from competitive to favored relative to Collins, I'll just say that "other polls" show anywhere from a slight Loeffer edge over Collins (with her support being very tenuous) to Collins romping.

The only way she gets saved is that because it's a jungle primary, the R-to-D suburbrons will have more freedom to choose whether they want to back a D or a moderate R (for strategic/"ancestral" reasons) prior to the runoff. A lot of people forget that prior to Trump, the GAGOP electorate was quite moderate and prone to erring on the safe side in their primaries relative to other Southron states (though more and more are now identifying as Ds - at least behavior-wise). For this reason and given the dynamics, it's very difficult to imagine a scenario where both Lieberman and Loeffer overperform expectations (minus the non-metro low-infos and as Pollster said, they are fighting for a certain demographic that mostly would've been reliably GOP even just a few years ago).