Georgia is finally a swing state. As a liberal living in Georgia, that is a very gratifying thing to be able to say. Over the last decade or so, I have watched Georgia slowly lurch from being a reliably red state to being a real tossup. I remember my excitement in 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign started putting significant resources into Georgia. Of course, I never expected her to win, but I hoped that by advertising and building campaign infrastructure, she would accelerate the state’s drift to the left. And then there was the 2018 gubernatorial election. We’ll never know if Stacey Abrams would have won had Kemp not pulled the tricks that he pulled, but either way, the Abrams campaign was a statement to the country that Democrats can win in Georgia with the right candidate and a little help from an advantageous national political environment.
Which brings us to 2020. In FiveThirtyEight’s Georgia polling average, Joe Biden is currently leading by 1.1 percent. Stacey Abrams has been widely discussed as a potential running mate for Biden, and although she does not seem very likely to be picked at this point, another Georgian has emerged: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Even if his running mate is not from the state, Biden looks quite competitive in Georgia. It won’t be a tipping-point state, so if he does win here, he will have already won rather comfortably. Nonetheless, Georgia still matters, because every dollar Trump spends here is a dollar he can’t spend in Pennsylvania, or Arizona, or Florida, or Wisconsin.
The good news for Democrats doesn’t end at the presidential level. In the regularly scheduled Senate election, one-term incumbent David Perdue is facing a tight race against Democrat Jon Ossoff. Polls suggest that the race is essentially even right now. Again, Georgia is not at the top of Democrats’ pickup list, meaning that if Ossoff wins, Democrats will likely already have clinched the Senate. But once again, every dollar McConnell spends here is a dollar he can’t spend defending vulnerable incumbents in Maine and North Carolina. Moreover, the difference between say, 51 seats without Ossoff, and 52 seats with him, could have a rippling effect. Having an extra vote in the Senate would leave swing state Democrats up for reelection in 2022, such as Catherine Cortez Masto and Maggie Hassan, free to vote against some of Biden’s policies if or when that becomes politically necessary, without actually blocking them from passing.
With the Democratic candidates for president and the regular Senate election looking so strong, one might expect the Democratic candidate for the special Senate election to be similarly strong. However, this would not be correct, because the Democrats do not have one singular candidate for the special election. In Georgia, special elections are held under jungle primary rules, so all candidates, from all parties, are on the same ballot in November. If one candidate gets a majority, they win, but in the more likely case where there is no majority, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff. In this election, there are three major Democrats: Raphael Warnock, Matt Lieberman, and Ed Tarver, all three of whom are running against each other, and against the two main Republican candidates: Doug Collins and incumbent Senator Kelly Loeffler.
This should be concerning right off the bat. Republicans are splitting their votes two ways, while Democrats are splitting theirs three ways. Let’s assume that there are roughly as many Democratic voters in Georgia as Republican voters. And let’s also assume that the five major candidates divide their parties’ voters roughly evenly. If this were to happen, Collins and Loeffler would both get a larger share of the vote than Warnock, Lieberman, and Tarver, meaning that Collins and Loeffler would advance to a runoff straight from the deepest depths of hell, confirming that this truly is the darkest timeline. But that scenario is admittedly somewhat contrived. We can look at the polls to get a more accurate picture of the race as it stands today.
Source |
Month |
MoE |
Collins |
Lieberman |
Loeffler |
Tarver |
Warnock |
Undecided |
Gravis/OANN |
July |
4.3 |
26 |
11 |
24 |
9 |
18 |
12 |
PPP |
June |
3.6 |
23 |
11 |
21 |
3 |
20 |
22 |
Civiqs/DK |
May |
3.1 |
34 |
14 |
12 |
6 |
18 |
12 |
Public Opinion |
May |
4.4 |
19 |
17 |
18 |
5* |
9 |
26 |
Cygnal |
April |
4.0 |
29 |
12 |
11 |
4 |
11 |
31 |
Battleground |
April |
3.0 |
36 |
11 |
13 |
3 |
16 |
17 |
AVERAGE |
|
n/a |
27.8 |
12.7 |
16.5 |
5.0 |
15.3 |
20.0 |
*This poll does not actually state what percentage Tarver received, only that it was 5% or less
What the polls from the last few months show is Doug Collins comfortably in first, followed by Kelly Loeffler, Raphael Warnock, and Matt Lieberman all within a few points of each other, with Ed Tarver far behind in fifth. Moreover, Loeffler has been rising in the polls now that her insider trading scandal is out of the news. At the same time, Tarver seems to have some momentum. He has almost no chance of qualifying for the runoff, so all he is doing at this point is making it harder for Warnock to do so. Undecided voters seem to skew towards Democrats, but as it stands, they would still be split across three candidates. All in all, if the election was held today, Collins and Loeffler would very likely advance to a runoff.
And yet, somehow, it gets even worse for Democrats. In addition to the three most notable Democratic candidates, there are four other candidates who could act as vote splitters. First are Richard Dien Winfield, a professor of philosophy at the University [sic] of Georgia, and Tamara Johnson-Shealey, who has been endorsed by the American Descendants of Slavery. Both are decent fundraisers, and both are running to the left of the three main candidates. Next is Valencia Stovall, a Democratic state representative who, for somewhat inscrutable reasons, is running for Senate as an independent. And last of all, the Green candidate, John Fortuin. GREEN: Getting Republicans Elected Every November. Each of these candidates on their own is fairly negligible, but when combined, they could shave a few percentage points away from the Democrats, and gift the second runoff position to Loeffler.
Of course, the Republicans have their own vote splitting concerns. First among them is Wayne Johnson, the former chief operating officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid, who is also running as a Republican. Al Bartell is a self-described former Republican who is running as a moderate independent. Another independent is Allen Buckley, who won over 4% of the vote as the Libertarian nominee for this seat in 2016. The Libertarian Party, for their part, have nominated Brian Slowinski. However, the idea that Libertarians draw from Republicans to the extent that Greens do so from Democrats is probably a myth; in 2016, they appear to have taken support evenly from the two major parties. It is quite possible that Buckley and Slowinski, and maybe even Bartell for that matter, could also take a significant number of votes from Democrats in November.
It is clear that the Democratic Party has a problem in the Georgia special election. What is less obvious is how they can solve it. After all, essentially every major statewide Democrat has endorsed Warnock, as have a long list of Democrats in the US Senate and House. What concerns me is not that the Democratic Party apparatus has not coalesced around one candidate. Precisely the opposite: it has, but Democratic voters are not following. Warnock can rack up as many endorsements as there are elected Democrats, but it won’t matter unless his polling tangibly improves. He simply can not take for granted that he will advance to a runoff. As long as Lieberman and Tarver are in the race, he risks falling into third place, consigning Georgia to suffer a bruising, nasty runoff between two of Trump’s most dedicated toadies.
I remain hopeful that Warnock can pull this out. And if, for some reason or another, his campaign falters, Lieberman can absorb his support and ride into second place. But I do dread the increasingly possible, and perhaps even likely, outcome where Collins and Loeffler both advance to a runoff. Who would I vote for in such a scenario? I simply can’t imagine pulling the lever for either of them. Perhaps it would depend on who wins the White House, and on who has control of the Senate. For however much it’s worth at this early stage, the Gravis/OANN poll had Collins leading Loeffler 34% to 28%, with 37% undecided. Even if this possibility does become a reality, Biden and Ossoff both have a real chance of winning Georgia in their own races. If Doug Collins being my next senator is the price I have to pay for Biden to flip Georgia blue, then so be it.