Eh, I'm not so sure about that on the former point. Ossoff beat David Perdue, and Warnock was at least as strong of a candidate as Ossoff in 2020. Loeffler was a pretty typical Republican.
You're incorrect. Ga is still very red at its heart. Except for the Warnock election, it was a red sweep in ALL of the other statewide races, and none were particularly close. See screenshot below. Warnock won a single ballot special election in 2020 vs a mixed field because two Republicans split votes behind him, triggering a runoff. Then he won the runoff because Loeffler ran a horrible campaign, is a horrible person and Trump told people to stay home because the general was rigged. Ossoff won a run-off (after David Perdue finished first in the general) because Perdue tied himself completely to Loeffler, Trump and the Big Lie. And Loeffler and he lost together. It was the absolute perfect storm for Democrats. Remove all that noise and GA is still, at its core, a pretty red state. Which was again proven this year. Had a more Kempian Republican run vs. Warnock this year, and not a dolt like Herschel, there would be no runoff and the results would have been consistent with all the other state races, none of which were closer than 5 points.
I literally just posted the other races earlier in this thread. I think you're underestimating how strong of a candidate Warnock is. Walker is a terrible candidate. But I don't think a more traditional Republican would have blown Warnock out. He may have lost to a better candidate, but it would have been close. There are reasons Warnock ran 6 points ahead of the next-best statewide Democrat, and it's not just Herschel Walker.
Warnock ran less than 3 points ahead of the next best Democrat (Jen Jordan), who would have made a terrific State AG), not 6 points as you mention above. And I’m not underestimating anything at all. I’ve lived in GA for almost 40 years have voted in 14-15 Senate races here. Had Herschel not been so horrific the margins in his race would have been similar to the others. Jordan is just as good a candidate here in her race, with as good as or better name recognition from her time in the state senate as Warnock had when he initially ran in 2020, and she topped out at under 47%. And that’s about where Warnock would have been against a decent candidate. There was literally no draft from Abrams for the down ballot this year (who had the lowest voting % in all of the state races). She didn’t run a great campaign throughout this cycle and her turnout this year was mediocre at best, which hurt everyone. She registered almost 300,000 people in GA since 2018 and received 100,000 less votes in 2022 as she did in 2018. You do the math on that.
You're talking about raw percentages. I am talking about margins. Warnock is 0.9% ahead of Walker. Jordan is 5.3% behind Carr. That's a margin of 6.2%. I disagree. Warnock is a well-liked incumbent. Jordan was challenging an incumbent. I just hope Democrats turn out next month.
Warnock will win by 5-7 points next month, in my opinion. And this year was at least the 4th 4-year cycle in a row that Democrats were shut out at the state level. Despite your thinking the state is blue, or even purple, it’s not. It’s still pretty red except under extreme circumstances like Donald Trump and Herschel Walker. Those circumstances haven’t existed in state races, which have voted red across the board for almost 20 years. On that score, @rivergator was correct and every state-level Democrat has been running against an incumbent, and failing, for almost 2 decades. So while I’d like to think Ga is less red than a place like Kansas, it’s not but for a bit of an aberration. I’ll believe it when we have a Dem governor again, and we haven’t in 20 years.
Georgia is much less red than Kansas. It is a purple state. Florida was a purple state. We'll see if it is moving forward. That was true despite the fact that Republicans were consistently winning the statewide elections to state offices.
True story. When I first moved back here after law school in the mid 80s, I was in a conference room on about the 30th floor of a perimeter office building overlooking I-285, talking politics with a senior partner. The guy pointed at 285 from the conference room and said “do you see that highway?. That highway is the only thing separating us from Mississippi” Things have changed a little. Cobb and Gwinnett Counties have turned predominantly blue, but the larger point generally remains.
I went to St Simons island on vacation in 2020. They were selling “F you Biden “ mugs in the gift stores. OTOh the downtown area by the beach/pier had a lot of shuttered stores. Tourists voting with their feet I suppose.
First runoff poll I’ve seen, relatively unbiased but only one poll. https://states.aarp.org/georgia/new-aarp-georgia-poll-voters-50-may-tip-scales-in-runoff-election
Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker getting tax break in 2022 on Texas home intended for primary residence | CNN Politics
