Georgia Runoff Election Preview

The buzz of the November 3, 2020, election is officially in my rearview mirror and I've finally finished consuming and analyzing the tidal wave of election results that occupied every moment of my free time for at least six weeks after the election.  With that in mind, I'm having a harder time getting into next Tuesday's Georgia Senate runoffs than I expected despite the high stakes and the increasing signals that an unpredictable and possibly exciting special election night lies ahead.

Most election analysts, myself included, were initially very skeptical of the chances for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.  The history of Democrats' prospects in Georgia runoffs has been abysmal in the past three decades, none more so than the most recent Senate race runoff in 2008.  On election night, Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss fell just short of 50%, leading Democratic challenger Jim Martin by only 3 points.  In the runoff, Democratic enthusiasm cratered while Republican enthusiasm surged, leading to a 15-point win by Republican Chambliss.  The fundamentals of the 2020 Georgia runoff are ostensibly the same as those from 2008, with the Democrat getting elected President in November and presumably altering enthusiasm dynamics.  The prospect of replicating the general election turnout model seemed massively daunting for Democrats in early November, and honestly it still does, but for a number of reasons, there's a real possibility that this time may be poised to be different.

First of all, Republican enthusiasm typically surges in the immediate aftermath of a high-profile defeat, but that may not be true this time, largely because of who lost and why Republicans believe he lost.  Republican base voters have been convinced that their beloved President Trump only lost because of a bipartisan cabal of mustache-twisting Bond villains who rigged the last election and will inevitably rig the next one too!  Since Trump has convinced them that Georgia's conservative Republican Governor Brian Kemp and conservative Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger are in on the conspiracy to steal elections for Democrats, the speculation is that Republican voter enthusiasm isn't where it needs to be.  The uninspiring profiles of the corrupt, swamp creature GOP incumbents on the ballot next week also aren't helping matters for Republicans.  There just isn't too much fire in voters' bellies to return the Bonnie and Clyde of the U.S. Senate back knowing they'll continue to loot the Treasury with their habitual insider trading antics.

Furthermore, Trump put Republicans in an even stickier position with his sore-loser antics over the stimulus bill, denying his party the easy win with a veto threat and giving Pelosi and the Democrats cover to increase the individual checks from $600 to $2,000.  This led to Loeffler and Perdue breaking character and supporting the popular supersized checks while McConnell and Republican Senate leaders are refusing to oblige.  It puts Loeffler and Perdue in the peculiar position of supporting something they'd never ordinarily support, making them look cynical and quite possibly less attractive to more traditional country club Republicans who agree with McConnell, but also making them look ineffective to more populist MAGA Republicans who want the free money from the government even though it's the diametric opposite of the "conservative principles" they believe they're abiding by.  Neither scenario is good for maximizing base turnout.

Now if I was just going by anecdotes of hypothetically lackluster GOP voter enthusiasm heading into this runoff, I wouldn't be inclined to buy it.  But the polling is backing it up, with most polls indicating small to modest leads for Ossoff and Warnock.  Polling was lackluster for much of the 2020 cycle, but Georgia was a state where the polling was actually pretty good.  More convincingly, early voting numbers are also backing up the narrative!  Democrats and demographically friendly voters are significantly outpacing Republicans even compared to the November general election.  With early voting now complete, polling analyst Nate Cohn recently concluded that Perdue and Loeffler's best chance of survival at this point is a blisteringly impressive election day turnout from Republican voters needed to overcome the deep hole they are likely in based on early voting.

I'm still skeptical though.  My guiding perspective in coming to my 2020 election predictions was that data points that seem too good to be true for Democrats likely are....and that perspective served me very well in 2020.  Georgia is a fast-changing state, but less than two months ago it required a perfect storm for Biden to eke out a 12,000-vote victory.  It just doesn't pass the smell test that two Senate race runoffs only two months later are likely to reproduce an even sweeter version of that same perfect storm.  Still, things are undeniably stacking up about as well as could be expected for Democrats, with their two candidates complementing each other demographically and potentially spiking turnout from all base voter groups in a way that wouldn't happen if either Ossoff or Warnock was running individually.  

On the other hand, having control of the Senate on the table is a double-edged sword.  Perdue outran Donald Trump by about 1 point in November, presumably less because of his unrelenting charisma than because some anti-Trump voters also weren't crazy about the Democrats controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress.  I suspect those voters still exist, particularly in upscale Atlanta suburbs, and will vote the same way they did two months ago, quite possibly below the radar of pollsters.  For that reason, I am predicting both Perdue and Loeffler prevail by 2 points, once again with parliamentary-style voting and very little ticket-splitting.  The least likely scenario is one Democrat and one Republican winning.  If that does happen, it probably means both races are just as close or closer than November's Presidential race in Georgia.

The question for me personally is....how much do I want these two Democrats to win?  On one hand, I think the party is moving in an ideological direction that is inconsistent with my own.  Holding the trifecta of federal government control will simultaneously embolden them to advance some dubious and unpopular policy priorities while endangering the party's candidates in subsequent general election cycles later in the decade.  On balance though, I'm pulling for Ossoff and Warnock to prevail here, primarily because their failure to do so locks Democrats out of having any capacity to shape the judiciary for a generation.  

The Democratic Party lost control of the Senate in 2014 and have missed three golden opportunities in a row to recapture it in the cycles since.  The aforementioned parliamentary nature of American voting in recent years suggests that even with their present minority posture, Democrats still hold more Senate seats than they should.  By the end of the decade, its unlikely they'll hold any Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio, for example, and may well be vulnerable in a number of GOP-trending Midwestern states where they currently hold Senate seats, with few obvious examples of races where they may be able to go on offense.  Given that the Senate is the government body that almost single-handedly shapes the judiciary, the Democrats' inability to win control of it has already led to three new right-wing Supreme Court justices and hundreds of Trump and McConnell-appointed right-wingers for other federal judiciary positions.

If Ossoff and Warnock win next week, Biden will have a two-year window to replace Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court as well and hundreds of other judicial seats.  It'll likely be the only two-year window Democrats get to shape the judiciary for the rest of the decade with the GOP advantage in the Senate being what it is and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future.  If they miss this chance, a generation of uninterrupted conservative judicial appointments will render the Democrats' legislative agenda moot and could lead to the unraveling of nearly every progressive policy success going back to Teddy Roosevelt.  And despite being brought about by popular vote in Senate elections, this prevailing right-wing judicial philosophy will certainly run counter to the populism of today's Republican voters, the MAGA crowd who fancy themselves "conservative" even as they wait by their mailbox for the $2,000 welfare check from the federal government stimulus bill.  The judges appointed indefinitely by Mitch McConnell, made possible by populist Republican voters who keep electing GOP Senators, are far more likely to resemble McConnell's governing philosophy than Trump's.

And there are legislative reasons to elect Ossoff and Warnock as well as the judicial reasons, even if not every legislative priority will be desirable.  State governments were shut out of this year's stimulus bill, despite a tidal wave of unfunded mandates related to COVID mitigation and balanced budget requirements that deny them the flexibility of the federal government.  With 50 Democratic Senators, the states would get some needed relief and hopefully avoid the vicious cycle of "austerity" and budget cuts that we saw in 2009 that dramatically slowed the economic recovery.  McConnell is already on record saying he "wants the states to go bankrupt", meaning its imperative his power be limited to keep the states from being pawns in his partisan political game.

As for the politics of the next cycle(s), it's not as though the governing party is gonna get any less of a rebuke in 2022 if they don't hold the Senate.  The Republicans are likely to make big gains in the 2022 midterms regardless of the outcome of these Georgia special elections, so the Democrats might as well have a brief governing majority and get some measure of accomplishments before McConnell retakes the gavel in two years.   I still think it's odds-against that Ossoff and Warnock prevail, but they have a fighting chance and on the first day of the new year, that gives me some measure of hope that we may possibly be able to avoid the lost decade that will come if they don't win.