Mid-term election cycles tend to not favor the party in power in the White House. True to form, President Joe Biden and the Democratic majority in the U.S. House and a tied balance in the U.S.
Senate is bearing the brunt of voter concerns about runaway inflation, recession, and fast-rising prices of too many consumer commodities and staples to mention.
Things don’t look great in Georgia for the Blue team. While metro Atlanta may have become decidedly Purple, it would appear the tide preparing to come rather boldly ashore will again be Red. By far one of the best websites for those of us who armchair quarterback and analyze elections, particularly before the fact, is RealClearPolitics.com, an invaluable resource.
The U.S. Senate Majority will be determined by a handful of close races in states once considered easy GOP wins, including the Georgia race between incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and GOP challenger, entrepreneur, and Georgia football legend Herschel Walker.
By the time the ballots are counted and the dust has settled, the campaigns for governor and senator—and their related Leadership PACs and 527s—will have spent close to $500 million in support of their candidate of choice. And while the only polls which truly count open on Monday, Oct. 17, and close on Tuesday, Nov. 8, the continuing series of voter polls and surveys that have preceded actual voting is settling into a pretty well-defined pattern.
During August and September, there have been seven polls by well-established polling organizations of the races for governor and senator in this state.
Victory for the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp, is being projected, outside the margin of error, in all but the Quinnipiac Poll, which he won by 2%, up to the Marist Poll, which he won by 11%.
But more troubling for Stacey Abrams and her supporters is that Kemp is at or above 50% in six out of seven of those polls, all taken well after two significant Supreme Court decisions in June reshuffled the national political landscape.
Second-term victory margins for Georgia governors during solid economic times have been significant, with Governors Sonny Perdue and Nathan Deal both out-performing their respective closing week polling numbers on Election Day.
On the bright side for Abrams, though late-breaking undecided voters will split they tend to lean away from the status quo. However, in the three most recent surveys, if Abrams takes 100% of the undecided vote, all Libertarians defect and break her way and Democratic voters out-perform the GOP on Election Day, that still won’t quite close the gap.
While Abrams is a tactical genius regarding both organization and voter turnout, her base seems less enthusiastic on several fronts compared to her surprise showing four years ago. She also is being outperformed in every voter poll and survey by Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent Warnock. In those same polling samples as the race for Governor, Warnock has bested four, and Walker three.
However, the margins are tighter in every case, between .3 (Warnock) and Warnock up by 6 in the Quinnipiac survey.
And the Libertarian Senate nominee continues to poll at 3%. Should that hold, another Senate runoff is likely; however, almost every Election Day, in close contests, the Libertarian vote implodes and most of those votes move back toward the GOP.
The growing coattails of Kemp and Walker bode well for most every GOP down-ticket contest, with the real likelihood that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, predicted by many to be politically DOA a year ago in Georgia, will out-perform (on a percentage basis) the entire GOP candidate and incumbents field.
There were some structural changes made in the Georgia Voter Integrity Act of 2021, primarily related to the timing window for no-excuse absentee voting and requiring Voter I.D. for those ballots as well. During the summer General Primary and Runoff, voter behavior then reset to previous norms of roughly 55% voting on Election Day, with 40-45 percent advance voting, and 4-5 percent of that vote being cast via absentee ballots.
Ms. Abrams handily won early and absentee voting in 2018, as did President Biden across Georgia in 2020, but both candidates also lost the majority of votes on actual Election Day.
As a result, my forecast at this point is a comfortable and possibly double-digit win by Kemp, with a much closer contest and potential runoff in the U.S. Senate contest. The one U.S. Senate debate has higher stakes for both candidates as a result on Oct. 14, three days ahead of advance voting. We are in the home stretch now with the outline of the results appearing to already be taking shape.