A Democratic Pickup in the 6th? Maybe Not So Much
Not long after the news began to spread Monday evening that 6th District Rep. Tom Price was going to be President Elect Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services, speculation began over whether there would be an opportunity for Democrats to gain another seat. After all, Trump had lost Cobb County. Even Nate Cohn, editor of the New York Times Upshot section got into the act:
Dem pick up opportunity. Clinton narrowly lost district in northern ATL burbs https://t.co/okeh0ANlSI
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 29, 2016
Well, not so fast. Just in time to answer that question comes the Daily Kos with a spreadsheet analysis of the presidential election results by House district. And while Trump won the 6th district by the smallest margin of any of the GOP districts. Yet in 2012, Mitt Romney took the district 61% to 37%. The Daily Kos analysis of the district called it “the type of very well-educated suburban seat where Trump was a poor fit.”
While Trump got 55% of the vote in the 6th district portion of Cobb, Price got 67%. In the part of Fulton County in the 6th, Trump got 49% of the vote, while Price got 62^%. And in the 6th district portion of DeKalb County, Trump earned 38% of the vote, while Prige got 52%. Of course, whoever runs for Price’s seat won’t have the advantages of a long time incumbent, but it’s also a mistake to look at how Trump fared in the district and apply that to the upcoming special election.
The Trump vote in the remaining 13 congressional districts is below the fold. As you might expect Trump did best in Northeast Georgia’s 9th district, followed closely by Northwest Georgia’s 14th. The ten GOP held seats gave their votes to Trump, while the for Democratic seats went to Hillary Clinton. It’s also worth noting that despite southwest Georgia being the strongest area for Trump in the primary, he couldn’t overcome the Democratic dominance of the area in November.
| District | Rep. | Clinton | Trump |
| 1 | Carter | 40.88% | 56.39% |
| 2 | Bishop | 55.00% | 43.27% |
| 3 | Westmoreland | 32.76% | 64.33% |
| 4 | Johnson | 75.30% | 22.24% |
| 5 | Lewis | 84.97% | 11.90% |
| 6 | Price | 46.82% | 48.31% |
| 7 | Woodall | 44.75% | 51.14% |
| 8 | A. Scott | 34.41% | 63.35% |
| 9 | Collins | 19.34% | 77.79% |
| 10 | Hice | 35.77% | 61.26% |
| 11 | Loudermilk | 35.33% | 60.32% |
| 12 | Allen | 40.70% | 56.86% |
| 13 | D. Scott | 71.02% | 26.61% |
| 14 | Graves | 22.09% | 74.98% |
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Jon Richards
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Thanks – a visual look at the districts
http://www.gfb.org/legislative/images/congressional_map_large2015.jpg
Keep in mind too that Price won against a nonentity who happened to have a “D” next to his name.
Rodney still hasn’t shown his face in public.
It goes both ways too: It’s something of a mistake to immediately say “Trump was weak, so it’s a pickup opportunity” but it’s completely pointless to cite Price’s election results as predictive to a special election. Why? Because there was literally no campaign in the 6th this time. The Democratic challenger was a “some dude” who, according to OpenSecrets (http://opensecrets.org/races/summary.php?id=GA06&cycle=2016) literally spent $0 compared to Price’s $2.2 Million. So winning 2-1 when you’re an incumbent and the other guy’s a name and a D on a ballot slip isn’t a ringing endorsement for the partisan lean of the district. Given that it’s going to be Trump’s Party going forward, that district could be very competitive in 2017, 2018, and 2020. Ditto GA-7, which went from went from 60.2-38.3 Romney to 51.1-44.8 Trump. Every other one just tinkered on the margins one way or another, getting slightly more D or R by just a few points. But you can bet the DCCC is going to be looking out for people to run in both of those districts going forward, especially if Trump stays as unpopular as he is.
Price didn’t spend $2 million dollars, but you are right that the guy was a token opposition. There is zero chance a democrat wins the 6th district.
I go by OpenSecrets. $399K of $2.25M went to the NRCC, but the rest looks like it went to normal campaign expenditure: https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/expend.php?cycle=2016&cid=N00026160&type=I
A sizable chunck of that went to other candidates. He formed a local PAC that helped a bunch of folks. But whatever. He would have beaten whoever ran against him.
But it’s a special…
Which means that the Democratic turnout apparatus that only works in Presidential years, and barely functions in off year November elections, will be no where to be found.
Like, for instance, the special in South DeKalb for State Senate last year…
I might have to go ahead and write a response on how a Democrat can win the seat.
You have fun with that.
I’d think that much depends on the GOP candidate, who, if s/he wants to win, will remember how deeply unpopular Trump is in much of this district. If it’s a GOP candidate who looooooves to talk about Trump and wants to make the sixth district great again, or whatever, I think a solid D candidate has more than a chance.
It’s a jungle primary. The top two vote getters move on to the runoff. There will not be separate primaries. Which is why a democrat has no chance. The two top vote getters will be republicans.
I doubt that. You have a lot of Republicans running (the post at the top lists 6) and likely only one Democrat that they’ll recruit / clear the field for, and that Democrat’s going to get, worst case, 30+% of the vote in round 1. Every Republican is then scrambling to get their chunk of the remaining 60-70%. Divide by 6, and that’s 10-20% per candidate. For two Republicans to get above 30% in that environment, every other Republican would have to absolutely crater: Even each of them getting 5% is enough to keep the other Republicans around 20%. So the Dem’s 30%–their floor/ceiling in a scenario where they lose by Price/Romney margins– is still enough to get into a runoff. Even in super Republican Louisiana and super-Democratic California, the prospect of having two of the same party in the final race rarely happens for precisely that reason, with the only exceptions being races where the party flat out doesn’t run anyone or screws up and runs too many people. (The CA-Senate result happened in part because while there were two Democrats running, there were 4 Republicans, none of whom cleared the field, and the primary took place on the same day as the Presidential one, where the Democrats still had a contest going on and the Republicans didn’t, so while 5.17M Dems showed up, only 2.23M Republicans did. But even then, the second Dem made the runoff with 18.9% of the vote. If one GOP candidate had stood instead of 4, they would have beaten that.).
What democrat in the 6th district has the ability to make the runoff? Names….
Unless there’s only 2-3 Rs, pretty much any D gets through so long as there’s only 1 of them. There’s only so much R vote and when you start slicing and dicing it 5 to 6 ways, it gets below the combined D vote, no matter how Republican the District is.
So no names on who you think will win. This is an academic discussion and not a particle discussion?
Win or make the runoff?
Rodney Stooksbury got 38% of the vote running against only Price, and nobody even knows who he is. You don’t think he would make a runoff against 5 or more non-incumbent Republicans?
Exactly. It could be Bennett, Holcomb, Stooksbury, or some guy who lives down the street from my sister. If there’s one D and 5 non-incumbent Rs, he/she makes the runoff
“You don’t think he would make a runoff against 5 or more non-incumbent Republicans?”
Absolutely not. There were 300,000 votes cast in the 6th. Or somewhere close to that. I’m not going to look it up. You can. The electorate for a special election will be completely different from the recent November election and I will go ahead and say that only 80,000 people cast a ballot in the special. Meaning the electorate will be older than normal, whiter than normal and more republican than in November.
Democrats had Hillary on the ballot to drive turnout. A democrat with no money and name ID with no help from the top of the ticket will not get anywhere near what Stooksbury got. But y’all go ahead and keep wishing.
Last time GA had a Congressional Special was in GA-10 after Charlie Norwood died. Turnout was way down: A little over 50,000 in the jungle primary vs. 174K in the district in ’06 and 291K in the district in ’08. You did end up with an R v. R runoff, but very narrowly, and that happened with 3 Rs and 3Ds getting more than 3% of the vote, plus a few more Rs and a Libertarian that got a few hundred votes each:
Jim Whitehead (R): 43.5%
Paul Broun (R): 20.7%
James Marlow (D): 20.3% (Difference of 192 votes)
Denise Freeman (D): 4.8%
Evita Paschall (D) 3.3%
Bill Greene (R): 3.0%
Whitehead was a state senator; everyone else, D and R, was an activist/businessman/whatever with no real experience. And even with 3 Rs and 3 Ds, in a district where the R consistently wins with 2/3 of the vote, you almost ended up with a D-R runoff. And even with the turnout dropoff, the total party vote was 72R-28D; only about 5 pts more Republican than it was in the ’06 midterm.
If there’d been one less Democrat, you would have had a D-R runoff, even with all the Democrats combined getting that low a percentage. Now, the 6th is going to have more than just one experienced R going for it, and won’t have 3 random Dems going for it. That’s a recipe for a D-R runoff, even with the big turnout decline.
Okay. The dnc will have to get involved to make it happen.
Hines Ward for Congress!
Well, the Eiger, looks like daily kos agrees with me that Trump won the 6th CD—their county of 160,000 to 155,000 was pretty close to my 159,000 to 154,000 county (minus some split precincts) back on November 16. But we should be able to agree that whether Trump had actually won or lost the district, it was extraordinarily close for a traditionally strong GOP district.
And actually, on another matter, the last special congressional election in Georgia was not in 2007 but rather in 2010, when Deal resigned his congressional seat early that year to run for governor. Other special congressional elections in the last 40 years in this state were the 5th CD in 1977 (when Andy Young resigned to become UN ambassador), the 7th CD in 1983 (when Larry McDonald’s plane got shot down by the Soviets) and 1999 in the 6th CD when Gingrich resigned as Speaker.
Yep. The split precincts made a bigger difference than I thought. He did terrible in metro Atlanta.
My bad. I forgot about the Deal Special when he skipped town one step ahead of the Ethics Committee.
That’s a weird one: 7 Republicans, 1 Democrat, and 1 Indy (in a 75-24 GOP seat) with the Democrat as ‘some dude’ who got all of 5.6%. Graves and Hawkins (State Rep. vs. State Sen.) faced off and made the runoff with 35 and 23% respectively, while two businessmen/doctors trailed with 15 and 11%.
And yeah, that’s super close for a traditionally strong GOP district. I think if he’d lost, it’d stay a GOP district as he’d be an outlier to the traditional suburban GOP brand. But given that the GOP = Trump for at least four years, that’s the kind of thing that tends to filter down locally. It goes both ways: It was a lot harder the last 8 years for Dems to maintain independent identities in places Obama was unpopular (see: the fates of a lot of rural dems 2010-2016), and same for Bush (See: The extinction of the entire Republican Congressional Caucus in New England, 2006-08) for the years before that. If it’s a swing district on a Presidential level, it tends to become one on the local level too.