In the lead up to the January 5th Georgia Senate runoff their was anxious speculation among Republicans as to how the Civil War between Trump and GOP State official would effect the turn out and results.
Those fears were well founded.
Numbers released by Republican Gabriel Sterling paint a stark picture of the collapse of the GOP vote across the State. In 5 out of 6 regions, Republican turn out fell well short of last November’s Election. In some instances more than doubling, tripling and nearly quintupling Democratic losses.
The most extreme example cited by Sterling was in North Georgia, where the Republican vote literally fell off a cliff, declining by 74.7k votes as compared to the Democratic loss of 16.7k. This region is the heart of Trump country in the State and where Trump held his last ditch rally for Loeffler and Perdue just prior to the runoff. The story of Republican under performance was much the same across the State with Republicans out performing Democrats in only one region.
Therein lies the Shocker.
The poorest performance by Democrats was in Metro Atlanta and its suburbs. Indeed, in Atlanta it was Democratic turnout that collapsed, falling fully 51.9k below the total for last November. More than twice that of Republicans. Democrats held on in the suburbs but only by losing a margin of 5.8k votes less than the Republicans.
In contrast, the areas of strongest Democratic performance were the regions of the Piedmont, the Black Belt and North Georgia. Democrats lost more votes in Atlanta and the suburbs than in the four other regions combined.
These numbers raise a host of as yet unanswered questions.
First and foremost, why did Republican voters stay away from the polls in droves?
The obvious answer is that the internecine combat Trump ignited in the State GOP, with utterly fabricated claims of voter fraud and attacks on Republican Officials and Politicians who oversaw the election, demoralized Republican voters and depressed turnout.
This is glib but superficial. It doesn’t really address the fundamentals.
How many of these absent voters were motivated by a credulous acceptance of Trump’s bogus claims that the system was rigged? How many were turned off by Loeffler and Perdue’s signing on to attacks on local Republican office holders? How many might have been moved by their disgust to punish Loeffler and Perdue and, by extension, Trump? How many may have gone so far as to cross over and vote for Democrats? We know from anecdotal News reports that at least some did for the first time in their lives.
These aren’t idle questions when we consider that Trump’s last eve of election rally to stump for Loeffler and Perdue was held in the epicenter of the GOP’s collapse. If it’s simply that the voters believed Trump’s claims that the November election was “stolen” so they didn’t bother to vote, why is it that they didn’t believe him when he urged them to turn out in the runoff?
A possibly more profound question is how the massive get out the vote effort by Democrats that worked wonders across the State could fail so abysmally in Atlanta and succeed only by the slimmest margin in the suburbs?
FiveThirtyEight had some inkling of this conundrum as soon as the day after the runoff:
It’s obviously hard to know whether these demographic relationships we see at the county level will hold among voters across the state — we won’t know that until we have more detailed voter data. But after suburbanites, especially white college-educated ones, were credited with swinging the state blue in the presidential election, these charts suggest that the Democratic senators-elect owe their wins to Black voters. It seems that split-ticket voters from the general election — who voted Biden for president but Republicans for the Senate, and who were largely concentrated in the wealthy Atlanta suburbs — were not key to the Democratic victory after all.
Still waiting for that more detailed data but what is clear at this point is that a number of assumptions about the politics of the election and of Georgia have been called into question. Chief among these is that the City of Atlanta and it’s suburbs are the key to winning State wide.
The combined decline in vote totals statewide for the GOP compared to November amounts to 207.2k. That’s almost three times Warnock’s margin of victory and almost five times that of Ossoff’s. If Democratic turnout had not so resoundingly outperformed Republican turnout across Georgia, we would likely be looking forward to Mitch McConnell returning as Senate Majority Leader.
With newly minted Senator Raphael Warnock having to stand for re-election in two years time, we need answers the to above questions as soon as possible.