No, Hating Trump Is Not Enough Turn Georgia Blue
As we ride the final third of the poop-flume that 2016 has been, let’s look forward to the end. The good news is that there are fewer than 60 days left until the worst Presidential Election in history is over. We need only endure the season of speculation the time when second-guessing the polls passes for news and desperate hopes are projected onto an uncertain future by people who really should just close their eyes and think of Thanksgiving.
The most current desperate hope is that Georgia may “turn blue” if Hillary Clinton can rise up from her sickbed long enough to capture Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. Nick Fouriezos, formerly of the AJC, is a bright whippersnapper who doesn’t think so:
So Fouriezos doesn’t think Georgia goes for Hillary this cycle, but I’ll take it one step further: Even if Hillary Henry Harrison wins Georgia’s electoral votes, the state won’t be blue. With Republicans holding every both US Senate seats, 10 of the 14 seats in the US House, every statewide office, and with overwhelming majorities in the State House and Senate, it’s hard to argue that Georgia can be “blue” in any meaningful sense.
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Mike Hassinger
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“Who will show this election who didn’t show up in 2008?”
Well…for one a lot of Georgia voters who were not eligible to vote back then (like those born 1991 and after). And a lot of those voters are minorities….in fact since 2008, Georgia’s white percentage (registered voters) has dropped from 63 percent to 58 percent. The number of registered whites in this state is not much different than it was 15 years ago. In metro Atlanta, Gwinnett is barely majority-white in voter registration, and Rockdale, once very Republican, is moving toward majority-black status. In Fulton, long the state’s most populous county, white registration is little different than it was 15 years ago, while black registration is up.
Secondly, not to be too morbid about it, but a lot of voters from 2008 are no longer with us—either moved out of state or up in the great voting booth in the sky. Doubtless, hundreds of thousands of Georgians have died in the last 8 years (you would think it was more that looking in the AJC obit columns!), probably many of them older, more conservative voters.
Things can change quickly in just a few years. Back in 1988, Bush Jr. defeated Dukakis in Georgia by about 20 points—landslide territory for sure. Four years later, Clinton won the state (obviously helped by Ross Perot). In 2004, North Carolina favored Bush Jr. by 12 points over Kerry; four years later, the state narrowly went for Obama.
Whether Democrats suffered a “major blowout” here in Georgia in 2014 is open to interpretation. Yes, the downballot races were not close, but both Carter and Nunn lost by 8 points—for sure, not a cliffhanger in either case, but Carter did reduce Deal’s 2010 margin by 2 points (From 10 to 8), and when you think of blowouts, you tend to think of contests like 15 or 20-poitns margins.
All that said, if Clinton were to win Georgia, it would require a large win in the 29-county metro Atlanta area, which may account for 60% or more of the state’s total votes this time. In 2012, Obama just narrowly won that region but lost heavily in the rest of the state. If Gary Johnson were to poll maybe 5-10 percent in metro Atlanta, that could given Clinton a potentially double-digit victory in the region. To be sure, Trump will win handily in areas like the north Georgia mountains and southeast Georgia—but of course the largest share of the state’s growth is in metro Atlanta, which is purple when it comes to statewide elections. If Clinton were to win here, then the next question would be whether this is an anomaly (due to a flawed GOP candidate) or something more substantial?
“Who will show up this election who didn’t show up in 2008?”
Me. I was in Illinois in 2008 (voted then too.)
People forget that Georgia was Romney’s second smallest margin of victory after his squeaking out a win in North Carolina. Obama won any number of “swing states” in 2012 by more than Romney won Georgia. The issue is that Georgia voters are largely inelastic. there just aren’t many swing voters. I still think its a cycle or 2 too early for Georgia to go Democratic and would only be attributable to how flawed Trump is at least in his appeal to college educated whites. He is in essence creating a group of swing voters who don’t normally exist in presidential contests. conversely, his appeal to whites with less than a college education is keeping Iowa and Nevada more in play than they have been the last few cycles. Unfortunately for him, democrats will trade Iowa and Nevada for Colorado and Virginia any day of the week and its his weakness with college educated whites that are putting those 2 so out of reach.
It is really amazing how much demographics in the country are changing. Ronald Reagan won 56% of the white vote in 1980 and that equaled a 44 state landslide. Romney won 59% of the white vote in 2012 and got blown out.
There’s an underlying assumption here that Democrats can only win by adding voters. I think there is still a good chance that the Trump candidacy and a third party candidate will be subtracting voters — both from the Republicans and from the turnout in general. So the question that needs to be asked alongside “who will show up who didn’t last time” is “who will stay home who didn’t last time”? That doesn’t mean I think Clinton will win the state, but that I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility.