Previewing the Georgia Runoff Elections
Analyzing the early Georgia vote
Welcome to the first big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere in 2021!
While it was a psychological relief to leave the unfathomably chaotic and awful 2020 behind, it turns out that Republicans and the Covid pandemic have followed us into 2021 and are wreaking just as much havoc in this new orbit around the sun. Shocking, right?
We’re actually starting the year with an absolutely pivotal week, with the Georgia runoff elections, the hissy fit that the GOP plans to throw during the Electoral College certification, an incredibly embarrassing revelation about Donald Trump, and a wide range of new state and local policies going into effect. It’s a lot to track, especially coming off the holidays, but I’ve got all the information you need right here, in one handy newsletter. Let’s go!
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What’s Really Happening in Georgia?
After approximately two months and 20,000 fundraising emails from the DNC, the all-important Senate runoff elections in Georgia will finally come to a close on Tuesday. Unprecedented in national significance, money spent, and early votes cast, the two elections will determine the balance of power in Washington and just how much President Joe Biden and Democrats will be able to get done over the next two years.
The top-line numbers in this race are staggering. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock each raised well over $100 million between mid-October and mid-December, outside groups have poured tens of millions into the race, and overall TV ad spending blew past $500 million last week. Voters have needed little motivation, though, having cast over three million ballots in the three weeks of early voting. That’s nearly 40% of eligible voters in the state, and just 18% off the general election early turnout, which is all the more impressive considering the holiday season off-days and the much larger drop-off generally seen in runoffs.
So what does it all mean? As we saw in November, huge early voting totals don’t automatically portend well for Democrats (remember the record-setting early totals in Texas?), so it’s impossible to know for sure. Still, there are plenty of political storylines and a treasure trove of data that together can give us a better idea of what’s going down in Georgia.
The big takeaway from the general election was that a decade’s worth of progressive grassroots organizing helped deliver Georgia’s electoral votes to a Democrat for the first time since 1992. Groups like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight and New Georgia Project, Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, and the Latino group GALEO registered hundreds of thousands of voters, built a community of political activists, and got them all to the polls. Other activist organizations have gotten involved for the runoff, while the campaigns themselves have also embraced community organizers; Warnock comes from a long tradition of civil rights activism, while Ossoff’s operation hired 5,000 organizers from the Black community for the last week of the campaign.
Each of these groups has been out in the field, knocking on doors and holding socially distant events, which marks a change for some of them since the general. Right now, it looks like all the energy and investment is paying off. Even accounting for what seems to be a newly established pattern of Democrats casting ballots en masse during the early voting period and Republicans waiting until Election Day, demographic numbers are promising.
“The early vote in the run-off is even more tilted towards Democrats,” Tom Bonier, a political strategist and the founder of the election analytics firm TargetSmart, told me this weekend. “The marginal difference is almost five points. From a demographic perspective, the biggest difference we're seeing is higher turnout among Black voters, whose share of the early vote is almost three points higher than this same point in the general election. That increase is coming almost entirely at the expense of non-college white voters.”
So far, over 112,000 Georgians who did not cast ballots in the general election have voted in the runoff, and Black voters account for just over 40% of them, which helps raise the overall vote share. Further, of the 76,000 new voters who registered between the general and special election deadline, 54% of them say they are a race other than white and 56% of them are under the age of 35.
The crossover here is probably quite significant, given the overall strategy. Warnock is deeply enmeshed in the community, while Ossoff, who was mentored by the late great Rep. John Lewis, continues to champion a new Voting Rights Act in his stump speeches and social media posts.
The Trump Factor
Donald Trump touted unfounded conspiracy theories about early voting throughout his campaign, which encouraged Republicans to wait until Election Day. Trump has reversed course on early voting for the runoff, and yet, conservative-leaning demographics actually fell off in the run-off’s early period. Now it’s a matter of whether the GOP will be able to turn out voters in even larger numbers on Election Day.
“That's the most important question at this point, and impossible to predict,” Bonier says. “We could be seeing a depressed GOP base, perhaps by the President's insistence that his party isn't doing enough to save him. Along the same lines, the GOP is yet to demonstrate that they can get their voters out when Trump isn't on the ballot. They struggled as such in the midterms. It is conceivable that what we're seeing is just vote mode shifting though, where Republicans are abandoning early voting in favor of Election Day. Republicans will have to hope that's the case.”
Trump plans to rally in the state on Monday, and he’s endorsed both Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who continuously and rather pathetically pledge their fealty to the outgoing president. But that’s just been a small side note to Trump’s main focus in Georgia, as he has also spent the last two months tweeting and moaning lies about Georgia electoral security.
The reality is that had his two favorite targets, Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger not purged over half a million voters from the system and made it especially hard to vote in Democratic-leaning areas, Trump would have likely been beaten by a much larger margin. His fury has been relentless, turning the right-wing zealots against Kemp and Raffensperger, and a sizable faction of those angry Georgia dead-enders have talked about abstaining from the runoffs as a protest against a Republican Party not loyal enough to their big wet messiah.
Plus, after today’s bombshell Washington Post story, Trump will be so riled up and aggrieved that he may not even mention Loeffler and Perdue at all during the Monday rally.
Unflattering stories about Loeffler and Perdue continue to emerge, as well. Both very clearly profited off the pandemic, both with insider stock trading and other improper uses of influence. Other than warning people about Ossoff and Warnock’s radical socialist ties, there’s not really going to be much for any of them to say at the rally.
Trump’s fight over higher stimulus checks also likely did significant damage to Loeffler and Perdue’s chances at re-election. When Democrats flinched, Trump stepped in and executed the plan I laid out in November and then again in December, putting Senate Republicans in the position of having to agree to $2000 stimulus checks or face losing their majority. Loeffler and Perdue both gave weak endorsements to the proposal in TV interviews, couching it as loyalty to Donald Trump, but the fact that Mitch McConnell blocked them reinforces the message that voting for Democrats to control the Senate is the only way to get bigger stimulus checks.
What About the Polls?
After this November, it’s hard not to want to take polls with a grain of salt. Still, it’s better to be ahead in the polls than behind, and right now, Ossoff and Warnock each lead the FiveThirtyEight poll average by about two points. One poll out today shows them in even better position:
None of this guarantees a victory for either Democratic candidate, let alone both of them. Biden only won the state by 12,000 votes, Perdue led Ossoff in the November election, and Election Day will undoubtedly see a massive GOP turnout. Whether it will be enough to overcome the larger early voting deficit remains to be seen.
“As we'll recall from the general, some counties will be slow to report, especially with the mail ballots. So the result may not be known until Wednesday or Thursday,” Bonier says. “My advice to the election junkies following the results is to focus on the early reporting counties, and see which candidate is running ahead of their November performance. If we begin to see a trend develop there, that will be helpful in predicting a winner.”
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It’s Happening In The States
State legislatures are already in session and new leaders have taken the helm in local governments across the country. There’s a lot to track, so here are some of the most notable stories of the last week.
Georgia
Let’s return to the ol’ Peach State one more time for some definitively positive news.
In Gwinnett, the state’s second-biggest county, the new sheriff has ended the county’s participation in the 287(g) program, which allows ICE to check the immigration status of people in the county jails. The sheriff’s office also introduced a new program that seeks to combat gang violence by “implementation of education, mentoring and enforcement.”
In the city of Athens, the new district attorney introduced a whole host of reforms, including never seeking the death penalty.
Illinois
Late last week, Gov. Penny Pritzker announced that his office and the Illinois State Police had together forgiven and expunged 500,00 criminal cannabis cases, delivering on a key component of the state’s legalization of marijuana. Counties have until 2025 to process and expunge records on their end.
On the other hand, the state failed to grant a license to sell marijuana to a single new applicant in 2020, which has given large white-owned businesses a chokehold on the nascent weed industry. The lack of licenses was allegedly due to a scoring error on applications, and Illinois is trying to correct the problem.
Pennsylvania
Republican State Rep. Mike Reese died of a brain aneurysm on Saturday, just a month after being diagnosed with COVID-19. The virus has been linked to neurological complications.
Reese had been a very outspoken critic of Gov. Tom Wolf’s emergency measures meant to combat the virus, supporting lawsuits against the governor and a constitutional amendment to strip future governors of emergency powers. He also pushed for months to restart school sports this past summer and fall.
His loss is tragic — he was a 42-year-old father of three young children. I just hope that people who refuse to take precautions or believe the virus is deadly take Reese’s death as a wake-up call.
Florida
State Rep. Anna Eskamani, a rising progressive star in a state Democratic Party larger bereft of them, has a nice write-up in the Washington Post this weekend. I interviewed her after the election and she did not hold back with her opinions about the failures of the state party.
Weed Watch
After four states legalized recreational marijuana in 2020, it’s looking likely that even more states will give the green light to legal green this coming year. Notably, it’s the Democratic-controlled state legislatures that are considering legalization in New York, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Connecticut, and Maryland, whereas most of last year’s legalizations came via ballot initiative.
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