The road to a Senate Majority for the Democratic party has always been a bit more challenging than for their Republican compatriots, as they had to win both Senate seats in the Georgia January runoff to secure victory. Republicans still retain their edge, but the odds of a historic double victory in Georgia are on the rise, as Jon Ossoff has flipped the script on Republican Incumbent David Perdue. In just two short weeks, Ossoff traded in his 2.5% deficit for a 1% lead.
My Forecast, Race to the WH, was one of the nation’s most accurate in 2020, outperforming Nate Silver in projecting the final margin on average for states in the Senate and Presidential election. My single best state was Georgia, and I launched a forecast for the Georgia Senate Runoffs.
Ossoff’s recent gains have sharply increased the Democratic party’s chances of winning the Senate. They are now at 44% — a nearly double-digit increase in just the last two weeks alone. However, Perdue still has a slight - albeit increasingly narrow - edge in our projection, buoyed by his edge in the November election and his status as an incumbent.
The picture always clearer in an election’s aftermath, but I think there’s a fair shot Perdue’s decline in the polls is a result of the blowback for backing the President’s assertions that the Georgia election was stolen from him. Perdue is more than smart enough to know these election fraud allegations are nonsensical - but he’s clearly convinced he has to support them or risk being on the receiving end of the President’s wrath. Trump has already demanded that former allies like Georgian Governor Brian Kemp resign. Similar attacks would likely be the kiss of death for Perdue. He’s not exactly shown restrain himself lately, and recently called for the Republican Georgia Secretary of State to resign.
Polling, as well as common sense, suggests most Georgians are not falling for the conspiracy theory. Just a month ago, Survey USA found Perdue was winning five percent of Democratic voters, compared to his fellow Republican Loeffler’s one percent. I'm betting Perdue has lost a significant portion of that support, and that's caused the race to tighten. Perdue is still the favorite, but this one is a tossup.
On the other side of the coin, Democrat Raphael Warnock has a 2.5% lead in the polls against Kelly Loeffler. He’s been leading her in the polls for months now, although she’s made some considerable gains of her own since the General Election. Back then - the polls had Warnock up by 7%. While 2020 was not exactly a banner year for pollsters in most states, in Georgia they excelled at predicted the Presidential election and were respectable in the Senate race.
However, that type of lead was unlikely to be sustainable, and was at least in part a result of the unique features of the race at that point in time. For almost a year, Loeffler had waged a brutal battle against fellow Republican Doug Collins for the final spot in the Senate Runoff that hurt more than a few feelings along the way. She’s since consolidated the right, as reluctant Doug Collins supporters, have come back into the fold. While they launched missives against each other on the airwaves, Warnock had a chance to built a political profile unmaliagned by negative ads.
Those days are long gone - and he’s been on the receiving end of a blitz of tens of millions of negative ads from Kelly Loeffler’s campaign and outside Republican-aligned PACs. Some of her attacks have raised eyebrows for their use of the worst kind of racial resentment politics. They’ve marked the unexpected return of Reverend Wright, who used to be President Barack Obama’s pastor in Chicago.
Then-Senator Obama faced headwinds in the final stages of the primary and early stages of the General Election when tapes of Reverend Wright were published where he had sharp criticism of America for its history of abuse towards African Americans, from slavery to Jim Crow.
In her eagerness to tie Warnock to Wright, Kelly Loeffler has drawn a staggeringly sharp contrast between herself and the late John McCain. McCain was under immense pressure as the Republican 08’ nominee to use the Wright videos as the tip of the spear of his campaign against Obama. His team, and much of the senior GOP brass, thought this was a golden opportunity to paint Barack Obama as a radical. McCain loathed the kind of dirty politics dripping in racial undertones and was adamant that they would not be used against America’s first Black Presidential Candidate on his watch.
Loeffler’s campaign is using a direct appeal to the very worst instincts in our country, the type of ghost we have fought for generations to exhaust but which far too often emerge from shallow graves to haunt us once again. It’s no coincidence that this specific style of tricks seems to emerge only when a black candidate has the gall to run for public office.
The entirety of the political world has their eyes squarely on this race, and most of them know exactly what Loeffler is doing. Not everyone has the scruples of John McCain, and if this strategy works, we will likely see it re-emerge across the country, especially against Black candidates. It’s up to Georgians to decide if this time things will be different.
You can keep track of the latest Projections for the Georgia Runoff at RacetotheWH.com. I also keep a list of all of the latest polls in the Runoff right here I’ve gone to great lengths to make my forecast as transparent as possible, and I break down all the components of my projection. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the state of the race, the reasons for Ossoff’s rise, and the consequences of the type of campaign Loeffler is running.