GA-SEN 2022 Megathread: Werewolves and Vampires

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Unpopular? opinion: Perdue is probably one of the stronger GOP candidates out there and his entrance probably precludes a total crazy like Jody Hice or Marjorie Taylor-Greene winning the nomination. On the other hand, as we saw in 2021, crazy turnout in Georgia might fall if the candidate isn't sufficiently crazy, and Democratic favored trends, as well as the inelastic nature of the state, should make a Warnock a favorite. However, while Perdue may get lower rural turnout, he will not be utterly annihilated in the suburbs (I could see Democrats breaking 61% in Cobb and like 66% in Gwinnett if MTG was the nominee ). TL;DR, Lean D is fair for this, and the GOP won't be throwing it away immediately.

I mean, Perdue was the worst-performing statewide Republican in 2014 and barely did any better than Loeffler despite being an elected incumbent. Literally, the only context I could see him as a 'stronger candidate' is relative to MTG.

Yeah. I'm not sure how we emerged from the senate election with this narrative that Loeffler was a terrible candidate and Perdue a strong one. Maybe it was because Loeffler's campaign seemed grotesque and Perdue's a standard Republican campaign and maybe it was because of the obsession here with Perdue/Warnock ticket-splitters and maybe it was just because of Perdue's last name, but in fact Loeffler and Perdue were basically identical in their performance.

It's not likely to matter too much who gets the Republican nomination (unless it's a truly non-viable candidate like Marjorie Taylor Greene), because Georgia elections are functionally Generic D vs. Generic R. That said, as said here, there's absolutely no evidence that David Perdue is a good candidate and clear evidence to the contrary.

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I really don't think you can justify Hershel Walker moving the race in favor of the Dems. Dude is literally a god over there. Who the hell would perform better than him? David Perdue?

Anyone under 50 probably does not remember seeing him play at Georgia. He has not lived in the state for nearly 40 years. He has a ton of baggage including domestic abuse, mental health issues and the fact his wife may be facing voter fraud charges. On top of all that he has zero experience as a candidate. Republicans would be better off with a generic R candidate (yes that includes Perdue) than Walker IMHO.

This is all true, and beyond that, the record of sports figures running for office is very spotty. Both Bud Wilkinson and Tom Osborne had more recent success (each was less than a decade removed from a national championship), lacked the baggage that Herschel Walker has, and were running in states with far more favorable partisan demographics. Neither succeeded in their run for statewide office. It's absolutely possible for Walker to win, but if he does it'll be because of turnout and because voters in Georgia are so inelastic, not because he won voters who would have otherwise chosen Warnock.

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After the disaster that was Insider Trading Barbie, I am surprised the GOP would take a chance on another political novice for this seat.

The Kelly Loeffler campaign certainly feels like it was disastrous because it was so grotesque to us, but the facts don't actually bear that out. Loeffler showed substantial skill in beating Doug Collins in a race whose fundamentals did not favor her, and then in the runoff she performed exactly as well as David Perdue, the supposed strong candidate. Obviously her campaign was a failure in the sense that she didn't win, but Perdue didn't win, either; her defeat wasn't because of ineptitude specifically on the part of her case but instead because of structural factors. If she hadn't performed an about-face and voted to accept Georgia's electoral votes the day after her defeat, she'd be well positioned to win future Republican nominations.

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Does Gary Black have an chance of beating Walker?  I would much rather vote for him.

My guess is that Walker already has the only endorsement he needs to win.

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Some major endorsements for Gary Black.

Gary Black endorsed Doug Collins, and all of these endorsements come from people who were on the Collins side last year. So far it appears that the lines are drawn in this election the same way as between Collins and Loeffler. Right now we have a good idea which of those two sides commands more Republican votes, and it wasn't even close. Of course something could happen during the campaign, but right now I'm comfortable taking Walker to win the primary; he has the support of the people whom Georgia Republicans actually care about.

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Here’s Trump’s formal endorsement for Walker.

He bought Herschel Walker way back in 1982 with a contract that promised that Walker would be paid for personal services even if the New Jersey Generals folded (as they did). Say what you will about Herschel Walker as a person, but the man stays bought.

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Why is it that in 3 of the most key Senate races races, the GOP is nominating complete nuts that had clear problems even before the primary (GA, PA, and AZ)? Obviously, the GOP may still win all 3 of these races and one can argued their favored too, but they seem likely to run behind the baseline.

Some may argue that Ds holding the Senate doesn't matter if Rs still win the House (which they favored to do), and while there would be a brick wall in terms of policy, it would allow Biden 2 more years of appointments for things such as courts which is powerful.

Also RoJo really isn't acting like a Senator who's up for re-election in a swing state; he's heavily relying on the year carrying him. In 2018, sure people like Stabenow and Baldwin weren't particuarly being moderate heros, but at least they stayed on the downlow.

It is really very strange. My initial inclination would be to say that it's weird that better candidates didn't bite, but we all thought Brnovich was a favorite for the seat a couple years back and he's getting smoked. I think the more likely culprit is that the two forces which dominate Republican primaries are base fanaticism and personal loyalty to Trump, neither of which is particularly aligned with electability concerns.

This isn't necessarily a good explanation for Georgia specifically, though; as can be seen in the gubernatorial primary, the party here seems to be more less fanatical and less Trump dominated. I think a couple of factors came into play here: 1. A number of state figures who probably would have been great recruits otherwise, particularly Raff, Geoff Duncan, and Chris Carr, are now known primarily as RINOs after the 2020 hullabaloo, which would probably not help them in a primary, *especially* one where they don't benefit from incumbency; 2. Walker's name rec and Trump cred is a potent combination even in a state like Georgia; and 3. People didn't realize the extent of that influence when weighing whether or not to jump in; if you told people at the beginning of the campaign that Kemp would smash Perdue by north of 50 points and Raff would avoid a runoff, I think you'd have a lot more candidates taking a serious look at the race.

Yeah, anyone could (and many did) predict on the basis of ten years ago that Republican lack of interest in good government would hurt them around the country, but in the specific case of Georgia we can't blame the Republican electorate directly, since Walker faced no substantive opposition. It was strange to me that he was seen as such an obvious winner because a) we have a track record of star college football players or coaches not doing so hot, even in Republican primaries, and b) nobody younger than 45 even remembers when Herschel Walker was a Bulldog.

Walker did have an obvious advantage aside from his football career in that he was associated with neither the Deal/Cagle faction (which supported Collins in 2020) or the Kemp faction (which supported Loeffler in 2020) and because his loyalty to the leader has been secure ever since he signed a lifetime personal services contract with the New Jersey Generals almost forty years ago. Given the decisive result of the presidential intervention in the 2018 gubernatorial primary, who would want to fight that?

In retrospect, it's easy to see how another Republican would have won: emphasize commitment to orthodox Republican policy rather than talking about absolute personal loyalty and dump all the opposition research that's clearly out there. A year ago, I don't think it was reasonable to think that that would work.

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I remembered today we have the joy of seeing Walker because of the hilariously stupid decision to appoint Kelly Loeffler

Who do you think would have done better? Do you think that Doug Collins would have won the runoff even as David Perdue lost?

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Amazing what Herschel Walker has done to his life & family all because Trump told him to run for the Senate.

Forty years ago he signed a lifetime personal services contract with the New Jersey Generals. Say what you will about Herschel Walker, but when he's bought he stays bought.

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One would think that part of repentance would be sincere admission of past sins rather than repeated denial, but admittedly I am not an expert in contemporary Protestant soteriology.

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One problem that Republicans have is that nobody under age 50 actually remembers the fabulous games he played as a running back with Georgia. It's not like it's Todd Gurley on the ballot.

[Хahar 🤔]

One problem that Republicans have is that nobody under age 50 actually remembers the fabulous games he played as a running back with Georgia. It's not like it's Todd Gurley on the ballot.

This.  One of my kids is a grad student at UGA.  As an undergrad, he had a student job that involved selling UGA gear at Sanford Stadium during home football games.  At the beginning of this year's campaign, I mentioned to him that Herschel Walker was probably running for Senate.  He replied "who's that?"

When I was a graduate student at Tech, one day there was an information session for an engineering job out in Villa Rica. It wasn't really my field at all, but I didn't have anything better to do and there was free food, so I showed up. The presenter mentioned that he was a Tech alumnus from the class of 1990 and asked if anyone knew what was special about that. There was an uncomfortably long pause before I raised my hand and saved the room full of undergraduates from embarrassment by saying what exactly happened at Georgia Tech in 1990.

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Walker seems to be even worse in this final stretch than he was in the last few months... and that's saying something

Walker's campaign did a pretty good job late in the campaign of keeping the focus away from his actual statements. How many times did you see videos of him speaking in October? It really wasn't many. Now that there are no other races to discuss, they can't do that anymore.

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That's a stretch of Ponce de Leon Ave. just west of the Moreland Avenue/Briarcliff Rd. (US 23) intersection. Driven by there many times; this is just inside Fulton County, but the DeKalb County line is literally two blocks east of where the photo was taken.

Man, I felt so good about myself for recognizing this and had a reply ready only to see that I'd been scooped.

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Still baffles me how the Georgia GOP and national GOP groups let such an awful candidate like Walker run- especially after Loefller.

Its not as if they’re short of a bench statewide; I’m tempted to say even some random state office holder, judge or random GOP aide (see Alabama senate) would have been miles better.

I'm not sure what "especially after Loeffler" means here. As I've pointed out repeatedly on the forum, if you use election results to judge how strong a candidate was, then Loeffler was just as strong a candidate as David Perdue, who we kept hearing was an especially good candidate. If you have some other metric for determining how strong a candidate was, then you should get rid of that and look at election results instead.

As for the question at hand, Republicans are obsessed with celebrities. The most prominent example of this is obvious, but you see this with the likes of Mehmet Oz and you see it in the way that the right-wing media stampedes to embrace any celebrity who might conceivably agree with them (as in the case of Kanye West). You can say a lot of things about Herschel Walker, but what you cannot say is that he isn't extremely famous.

There's also the matter of Walker's longstanding relationship with the leader of the Republican Party, going back to his time with the New Jersey Generals in the 1980s. His loyalty meant that he was always going to get the only endorsement that mattered, and once he had that nobody else stood a chance in the Republican primary.

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"Atlanta is the cultural leader of the United States." - Rachel Maddow

Um... I mean it's a great city and all but New York still exists among other things.

Atlanta is the cultural center of black America. It's correct that this makes it the cultural center of America, but until recently nobody in media would have made this jump.

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Washington and Baldwin flipped since the GE.

Had Biden won them in 2020, or is this the most ever counties carried by a Dem since 2002?

Jim Martin definitely won more counties in 2008 than Warnock did this year.

[Хahar 🤔]

Washington and Baldwin flipped since the GE.

Had Biden won them in 2020, or is this the most ever counties carried by a Dem since 2002?

Jim Martin definitely won more counties in 2008 than Warnock did this year.

Are you sure? Here's the map.

Yes, I am sure. Martin carried 42 counties in the general election, plus one that was an exact tie. My count of current results has Warnock at 30 counties. This isn't even close. You don't even need to count them to figure this out; a quick look at the map will make it obvious.

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It really is a mess how regular election folks on Twitter knew exactly what was going on and the people getting paid to do this on TV literally have no idea what they're talking about.

By contrast, this thread was an unreadable mess on election night. I expect this forum to be the most knowledgeable place anywhere about elections, but instead last night every post consisted of commentary on the needle, as if I couldn't go to the New York Times website and go look at the needle myself.

I was able to use the collective knowledge of this community to get information last night that confirmed that Warnock would win easily when other people didn't know that, but I had to go off the forum to do it, because at the same time everyone in this thread was posting about how great Walker was doing.

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Among GA-01, GA-06, GA-11, and GA-12, which are the best long term prospects for Dems?

I’d personally argue that the only truly safe districts for the Republicans for the coming decade are the 8th, 9th, and 14th. Given that the 3rd and 10th both contain the bulk of the growth of the southern suburbs of Atlanta.

Guess it depends on which of the pro-Dem trends are strongest. 6th and 11th rely on white suburban voters more (I suspect those are probably the districts in which Abrams will have ran most behind Warnock); I’d say the 6th would likely be a good place for Carolyn Bourdeaux to run in a future election if she wants to make a comeback to Congress. The 10th is probably the most likely aside from those two, but has a very strange coalition of black voters in the expanding south Atlanta suburbs, the Athens area which is largely liberal white voters, and rural black voters.

I can't think of a case why the 8th would be competitive, but the 9th theoretically could be if Hall zooms leftward and Dems get Stalinesque margins out of Gwinnett. The 14th if the Cobb portion becomes deep blue and Paulding sees an influx of suburban Democrats.

Hall is far enough outside the city that it hasn't yet moved left at all: in the first round in 2008, Chambliss won it by 42 points, while in the first round this year Walker won it by 44. I suppose what that means is that there's a lot of room for Democratic growth, but presumably the white flight has to go somewhere, and so far it's been collecting in Gainesville. Anecdotally, when a friend of mine mentioned that she worked with a guy who lived in Gainesville, the reaction among everyone was to make cracks about how he definitely hadn't moved there for the schools.