A Georgia district attorney race should set off political alarm bells for Rev. Raphael Warnock and his team as the Democratic Senate candidate tries to unseat appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler.
Deborah Gonzalez, a Democrat, won her special election runoff Tuesday to become Georgia’s next Western Judicial Circuit district attorney. But voter turnout in her jurisdiction’s key Democratic stronghold was low. And that’s a trend Warnock will have to buck if he hopes to beat Loeffler on Jan. 5.
Warnock and Loeffler are running together after finishing as the top two candidates in a Nov. 3 non-party primary. The race is for the final 22 months of the term won by Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson in 2016. Isakson resigned from the Senate about a year ago due to health reasons.
The Warnock-Loeffler fight is actually one of two Georgia Senate races that are headed to a runoff on Jan. 5. Republican Sen. David Perdue is trying to win a second six-year term against the Democratic nominee, filmmaker Jon Ossoff.
Both races have national significance as they’ll determine who holds a Senate majority during President-elect Joe Biden’s first two years in office. Democrats need to win both races to grab a bare majority, while twin GOP victories would give Republicans a 52-48 edge.
Polls show both races are effectively tied. But Georgia elections that have happened since Nov. 3, like the judicial race Gonzalez won, show a marked fall-off in Democratic support in some areas the party needs to win strongly if its Senate candidates have hopes of prevailing.
Gonzalez received about 13,500 votes to independent prosecutor James Chafin’s 12,600, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. That’s about 52% support for Gonzalez. Yet, while turnout was lower across the board compared to the Nov. 3 elections, it dived even deeper in Athens-anchored Clarke County than in conservative-leaning Oconee County.
University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock warned Warnock that the results were “a straw in the wind.”
“We recognize that Clark County and Oconee County vote at different rates anyway,” he said. “But even factoring that in, the Clark County folks did not do as good a job at coming back.”
He added, “And Clark County being a Democratic county and Oconee being a Republican county, that does foretell what could happen in January, with Republicans coming back at higher rates than Democrats and then they win.”
The turf war over Georgia’s suburbs is defining the special election runoff between Warnock, 51, and Loeffler, 50.
Bullock described the suburbs around Athens as “still quite red,” in contrast to those around Atlanta. The biggest pools of Democratic votes in Georgia are greater Atlanta’s Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.
“Democrats, to the extent that this is a warm-up for January, would like to have seen their voters come back at the same rate of return,” Bullock said.
Yet, Warnock may outperform Gonzalez for one main reason: Warnock’s background.
“Deborah Gonzalez is Hispanic and not black. Raphael Warnock is black. And the core constituency for Democrats are African Americans, where Democrats should get around 90% of the black vote,” Bullock said.
History, though, is against Warnock. If successful, he’ll be Georgia’s first black senator. And the state hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 2000. In fact, it’s been 28 years since it last backed a Democratic presidential nominee, Bill Clinton, before turning blue this cycle for President-elect Joe Biden.
Republicans have also won every runoff in Georgia’s electoral history. State-based political pundits chalk up the GOP victories to precipitous Democratic voter drop-off.
Democrats may break that Republican winning streak in January depending on whether the national attention, the fact that there are two runoffs on the ballot, and Warnock’s historic candidacy gin up voter enthusiasm.
To capitalize on any excitement, Democrats must replicate their organizing efforts from before Nov. 3. That was led largely by 2018 Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams.
However, it’s tricky to apply conventional political wisdom to Georgia.
Georgia Democrats are motivated by the prospect of Senate control to help Biden pass a liberal agenda through Congress. But the state’s Republicans are equally driven to return Loeffler to the Senate, bolstering Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s influence in the chamber.
And turnout before Jan. 5 may be boosted by a greater reliance on mailed-in ballots. At the same time, turnout may be suppressed by Trump and his allies discouraging people from voting with their fraud claims.
“Democrats seem to be much more united than Republicans,” Bullock said. “It’s hard to know what share of the Republican electorate is buying into the argument made by Lin Wood and Sidney Powell.”
He continued, “Democrats are sitting back and cheering.”
