Exactly How Many Legislative Seats Are Contested This Year?
It started with a tweet from Johnny Kauffman, political reporter for WABE news:
In Ga. 80% of statehouse races will be uncontested in November. https://t.co/kPwRaFQZii #gapol
— Johnny Kauffman (@JohnnyIK) June 20, 2016
That began a bit of friendly banter between several of us who regularly hang out at #gapol, wondering, first of all, whether the 20% estimate was credible, and second even if it was, how many truly competitive seats there were under the Gold Dome, given that most incumbents had successfully fought off their primary challengers. The discussion went on for a bit, reaching no firm conclusion, partially because Donald Trump once again stole the news cycle for the day.
Was he right? It depends on how you define the issue. Of the 105 contested seats in the legislature out of a total of 232, 60 of them will be settled in the primary or July runoff. Only 45 will be contested in November. If your goal is to measure dissatisfaction with incumbents, you should include the primary numbers. If your goal is to measure party challenges, you should measure November. Then you have the question of open seats in the legislature. There are 22 open seats this year. 10 have only Republicans running and 8 only have Democrats, so these will be settled in the primary. 4 seats will be decided in the general, since there are candidates from both parties.
IF you take Kauffman’s tweet literally, and ignore the primaries, he’s pretty much on the money. The winner of 19.1% of the seats will be decided in November. If you take a broader view and include seats that were won in the primaries, including open seats, the percentage goes way up to 44.1%.
Of course, the raw number of challenged seats doesn’t indicate the chances of the incumbent actually losing his or her seat. Our little Twitter discussion group only came up with three candidates where the outcome might be in doubt: Taylor Bennett’s seat in Brookhaven, Joyce Chandler’s seat in Lawrenceville, and Mike Cheokas’s seat in Americus. There are probably more. I can think of JaNice Van Ness’s seat in Rockdale County, for example. Let us know in the comments if you can think of any others.
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Jon Richards
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Thanks for this post, Jon. It’s a pretty good guide/starting point for state legislative election analysis.
I do have one quick question: does the 44% mean those seats were contested in both primary and general or just one or the other?
The 44% are the 105 seats that at some point had two or more people trying to win the seat. That could be an incumbent challenged by someone of their own party or the opposite party. It could also be an open seat where two or more candidates ran. (Carl Rogers’s seat fell open after he retired, but only one candidate qualified to fill it, so I didn’t count that seat.
And by way of clarification, if a seat was contested in a primary, and the primary winner will be contested by the opposite party in the general election, I only counted it once. There were a dozen seats like that, listed as R & D in the table above.
Or looking at this from the half empty side only 1.4% of the incumbents are facing an effective challenge.
We need open primaries and top two going to the general. It isn’t a panacea to business as usual but it would at least be a start and would be better than the alternative of artificial term limits.
The Augusta area (Columbia and Richmond Counties) was mostly decided in last month’s primary, with one incumbent losing (Ernie Smith of Richmond’s House District 125) and Mark Newton winning the GOP nomination to replace retiring Rep. Barbara Sims in House District 123. There is a GOP runoff for the seat of retiring Senator Bill Jackson, in Senate District 24, between Lee Anderson and Greg Gryzbowski, with the winner facing Democrat Brenda Jordan. But with heavily Republican Columbia County dominating this district, a Democrat would be a long shot here. Columbia County being heavily Republican and Richmond County almost as heavily Democratic, it is easy to see that the May primary, and not the November general election, basically determines who will go to the Gold Dome the following January from this area.
Bennett’s seat in DeKalb/Fulton (Brookhaven/Sandy Springs area) may be the top GOP target in part because Romney won his district in the 2012 general election, but unclear if Trump will have any pull, given that the district handily backed Rubio over Trump in the March GOP presidential primary and has a lot of “country-club” voters who may find Trump too rough around the edges. Some also mention the adjoining House District 81 of Democrat Scott Holcomb as potentially competitive, given his low 53% showing in 2014 against Jim Duffie.
In many of the district, however, the contests look about as competitive as Alabama and Podunk State on a fall football weekend, more like a kamikaze run. As one Democratic example, you would have to figure the odds are not with Democrat Brandon Crisp in the ultra-Republican House District 11 (Rep. Rick Jasperse) in the North Georgia Mountains (Pickens County area), or with Republican Ralph Nobles in the hyper-Democratic House District 60 (Rep. Keisha Waites) in the College Park/East Point/Hartsfield-Jackson area. Similarly at the congressional level, Republican challenges to Hank Johnson and John Lewis respectively will not be close on election night.
A very few have lost seats in the initial primary. A very few more will lose seats in the runoff. A very will lose seats in the general. All in all my speculative guess is 95+% of officeholders stay in office if they want to. It’s more secure than working for a regulated utility.
To my knowledge, no one lost their seat in the primary. To my recollection only 2 face a primary runoff and both of those only missed the majority by a point. It may have only been 2 Republicans. Whatever. Per Jon’s numbers above, out of 214 incumbents only 3, possibly 4, are actually in any danger of losing their seat. It’s more secure than working for Southern Company as the owner of the regulated utilities.
Quoting somebody here, but Earnest Smith of Augusta and Rahn Mayo of Decatur lost their seats in the primary. There are also three primary runoffs to be decided: John Yates in Griffin, Tom Dickson of Cohutta and Darryl Jordan of Riverdale.
Well Hell, I didn’t pay no mind to the Democrats 😉