Data Shows An Opening For Democrats In Georgia
In the past, Democrats have asserted that demographics in Georgia, spurred by population growth in the metro-Atlanta area, would eventually give them the ability to be competitive in statewide politics. Their case is based on increased Asian American and Hispanic registration and strong turnout among reliably Democratic African American voters. This was the argument in favor of a strong showing by former Democratic Senate candidate, Michelle Nunn, back in 2014. From Osita Nwanevu over at Slate:
The changes that have taken place in Georgia mirror the kinds of changes that have put into play other formerly solid Republican states in the South, like Virginia and North Carolina. As with these states, Georgia’ population has been growing and diversifying. In 2000, roughly 63 percent of Georgians were white. Today, an estimated 54 percent are, the result of a Latino population that has grown from roughly 5 percent to more than 9 percent, a black population that has grown from 29 percent to 31 percent, and an Asian population that has grown from roughly 2 percent to 4 percent.
For old time’s sake, you can read the full article, here.
Due to her rather poor showing when faced with a national Republican wave, it seems that trusting in demographics could be a formula for success later rather than sooner.
Or, there could be yet another way for Georgia Democrats to get their foot in the door. In yesterday’s New York Times, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn made a slightly different argument to explain why Georgia may be in play for the Clinton campaign.
The simple way to think about Mr. Trump’s strength is in terms of education among white voters. He hopes to do much better than Mitt Romney did in 2012 among white voters without a degree so that he can make up the margin of Mr. Romney’s four-point defeat and overcome the additional losses he’s likely to absorb among well-educated voters and Hispanic voters. Even when Mr. Trump has led in the polls, he has fared worse than Mr. Romney among those two groups.
Cohn goes on to say:
But that doesn’t work so well if there aren’t many white working-class Democrats for Mr. Trump to win over, or if there are a lot of well-educated voters for him to lose. That’s more or less the situation in Georgia, and across many red states. According to our estimates, Mr. Obama probably didn’t even win 15 percent of white voters without a degree in Georgia in 2012.
We’ve heard ad nauseam about how Donald Trump swept through the Republican primary primarily on the backs of white, working class voters – whites without a college degree. That turned out to be a very effective strategy in the primary, but now, Trump is faced with daunting numbers coming out of swing states where a lot of college educated whites, women especially, can’t stand him.
According to Cohn, President Obama probably received around 15% of the non-college educated white vote in Georgia during his reelection bid in 2012. For Trump to pull off a victory, assuming his numbers remain stable in every other demographic group, he would have to push Clinton down to around 5%. Cohn says that’s “not credible”.
His best bet is to increase turnout, but that’s less powerful than persuasion: Flipping a voter gives you one more vote and takes a vote away from your opponent; increasing turnout gives you only one more. At the same time, white voters represent a smaller share of the electorate in the Deep South. In Georgia, just 58 percent of registered voters are white. Put it together, and white working-class Democrats make up just a sliver of the electorate. Even if Mr. Trump could make big gains with them, they wouldn’t move the needle very much over all.
Ironically, it may not be demographics that flip Georgia in 2016. It may actually be the very group of voters who served as the base of the Georgia Republican Party in the mid-90s into the early 2000s: middle to upper-middle class white suburbanites with a college degree. There’s many more college educated white voters to lose than the previous group Cohn addressed; Romney won 75% of them in 2012. Not only is Trump already doing historically bad with them, but the worst could be yet to come.
According to Cohn and others, the polls show that this group is the most likely to either stay home, or pull Georgia’s lever for a Democrat for the first time in 20 years. The question of whether or not Trump can turn these voters out for him in November remains to be seen.
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Of course, those are two sides of the same coin (at least as far as Georgia following Virginia and North Carolina into purple state status): A key factor in the transition in those states, especially Virginia, has been the shift of highly educated suburbs from GOP to swing counties to (in the Virginia case) Democratic strongholds. Basically, having the educated whites who live around DC/Charlotte/Research Triangle vote the way that Northeast and Mid-Atlantic Suburbs do. (In part, that’s a legacy of both the Bush years and the Tea Party era, driving out more socially moderate, highly educated suburban swing voters from the party), Atlanta’s been slowly following in that direction (Fulton’s moved from a place Kerry and Gore won by less than 20 to a place Obama won by 30-35; Cobb and Gwinnett have gone from places that gave Bush a total margin of 150,000 to giving Romney about 66,000; Suburban counties Douglas, Newton, Rockdale, and Henry have switched from Red to Blue) . Some of that’s migration and demographics, but not all of it. And Trump could be a catalyst for that transition.
I think it would interesting to see the effect of local and state candidates on this effect. I’m thinking about Ken Cuccinelli and the recent spate of losses the Virginia GOP has endured. A lot of political scientists put stock in having good candidates running and I think it would be interesting to try to tease out a correlation/causation there.
Your second part goes directly to my point. While there has been a large amount of migration, I don’t think it accounts for all of the change that you listed in the big counties. Anecdotally, Country Club or Chamber Republicans aren’t as involved in the party as they were in the 90s and early 2000s. Partly because we’ve been winning so much they didn’t need to and perhaps partially because they are tired of being called soulless RINO squishes. I think it’s only natural that those Republicans then start backing moderate Democrats at the state legislative level and don’t bother with ring wing political theater that a lot of state politics has become.
Areas like Fulton, Cobb, and Gwinnett could easily go the way of Loudon, Fairfax, and others. Having Republican candidates that don’t represent their constituents as much as they might represent the conservative bent of the party as a whole, could potentially help or accelerate this expanding “doughnut hole” around Atlanta where Republicans are forced to go further and further outside of Atlanta to get their votes.
I also think you’re dead right that Trump could greatly accelerate this process. It’s why I’m so worried about Georgia this fall.
The precinct I live in is right on the Dunwoody/Sandy Springs border, its 85% white and has to be very high on the percentage college educated. Romney carried it with 70% of the vote in 2012. While of course its anecdotal, I can’t tell you how many conversations I have overheard at church or just out for lunch in the neighborhood where I hear people say they will be voting democrat for president for the first time (or for some of the older folks, since 1976). I’m going to be fascinated to see how close to 50% Clinton will get here. I think the above commentors are spot on, if the republican party continues after this election down the Trump populist path, with a solid investment of time and money, a Taylor Bennett type Democrat could get elected around here in the not too distant future.
Certainly Trump is hemorrhaging votes from college-educated whites but there’s another important cohort that doesn’t get mentioned often where he’s in the toilet, the 18-29 group.
I’m looking at crosstabs from today’s PPP poll of SC that has Trump up 42-39. But among the 18-29 group he’s getting devastated, losing to Clinton 51-19 with Johnson and Stein at 6 and 7. Trump is barely above undecided at 16.
Younger voters turn out in relatively smaller numbers but early attitudes can persist. Antagonizing an entire generation is not the way to grow a party.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/PPP_Release_SC_81116.pdf