GA-Sen: Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill on Thursday evening that makes voting in Georgia much tougher, and it also contained provisions that addresses more issues that have bedraggled his party recently.
The legislation slashes the time between the first general election and any potential runoffs from nine weeks to four, a decision that came months after Republicans lost both the state’s Senate seats in a second round of voting. The new law also does away with all-party primaries for special elections and instead replaces them with the sort of partisan primaries that the state uses for regularly-scheduled elections.
The reduced runoff period came about after an election cycle where Republican Sen. David Perdue led Democrat Jon Ossoff 49.7-47.9 in November’s election. Perdue did not quite take the majority of the vote he’d need to win outright under state law, though, and Ossoff defeated him 50.6-49.4 in January. Republican candidates running in the fall’s special election all-party primary also outpaced the combined Democratic vote 49-48, but Democrat Raphael Warnock beat appointed GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler 51-49 earlier this year.
Perdue was pissed how things turned out. Last month the former senator ranted that “[m]ore than 52% of Georgians rejected my opponent and the liberal Democrat agenda" in November without bothering to mention the majority that voted for Ossoff two months later. Perdue also suggested that the runoff itself was unfair, carping that Ossoff and Warnock "do not fairly represent most Georgians."
Perdue’s complaints about the election process were particularly rich coming from a Republican, since it was Republican lawmakers themselves who in 2005 reinstated the runoff law that would force him into a second round. Republicans knew that Black voters—who disproportionately favor Democrats—tend to turn out at lower rates whenever there's a second round of voting, a pattern that held true in every statewide runoff from 2006 to 2018.
However, legislative Republicans did not take Perdue’s griping, or their loss in January’s overtime elections, as an invitation to get rid of the general election runoff and require that candidates only win a plurality of the vote in November, which is the law in most other states. Instead, Team Red seems to have decided it will benefit them more to keep that second round and hope that the shortened calendar will harm Democrats. They may very well have the chance to test this theory out next year when Warnock will be up for a full term.
The move to change the special election system, meanwhile, comes a little more than a year after a different drive to do away with it collapsed amid GOP infighting. In January of 2020, Republican Rep. Doug Collins announced that he would challenge Loeffler in that November’s all-party primary. Just before that declaration, though, a state House committee overwhelmingly advanced a bill that would have required a partisan primary in May and a general election in November.
Collins’ Republican allies backed the push believing that an earlier race against Loeffler would benefit the congressman, a Trump ally who initially had far more name-recognition than Loeffler. Democrats also supported it believing that, with Warnock and several Democrats already running, it would be all but impossible for one of their candidates to secure the majority of the vote they’d need to avoid a second round of voting. There was also a chance that a multi-way split on the left could also lead to the nightmare scenario of both Loeffler and Collins advancing to what would be an all-GOP runoff.
However, Kemp liked the status quo just fine last year and threatened to veto any measure that would change the rules of the 2020 special Senate race. Ultimately, the bill never even reached Kemp’s desk, and Loeffler and Collins were left to keep fighting it out until November. That scenario likely benefited the deep-pocketed Loeffler, who now had several more months to enjoy the benefits of incumbency and run ads promoting herself and attacking Collins.
It’s impossible to know if Republicans would have kept that Senate seat if they’d switched to a primary system a year ago, but they sure didn’t win the special election that took place. While polls taken as recently as mid-September found that an all-GOP runoff was a possibility, Warnock vaulted to first place as he got his name out during the fall. Loeffler and Collins, meanwhile, both tacked hard to the right as they spent months and months fighting it out. Warnock ended up securing first place with 33%, while Loeffler beat out Collins 26-20; Warnock then went on to beat Loeffler in January.
Both Loeffler and Collins are considering taking on Warnock in 2022 for a full six year-term, a contest that will take place using the state’s regular primary system.