Georgia Runoff: Impending Coronation
On December 6th
“Meet me on the road/Meet me where I said/Blame it all upon/A rush of blood to the head”
Any long time readers of the Scrimshaw world know that those lines – the last four of the Coldplay song of the name of the last line – are very meaningful to me. A Rush Of Blood To The Head is both just a beautiful and haunting song, but the last four lines have a second meaning to me. It’s a riff at a fairly consequential scene of one of my unreleased novels, and so everytime I hear the song, I think of the scene.
That scene – which I can see the same mental picture of in my head now as the moment 14 months ago when I wrote it – takes place in Forsyth Georgia, the whites-only-until-the-90s county that used to be the bastion of GOP votes in the state. This will be repetitive for those who have read my work for a while, but Forsyth, much more than Cobb and Gwinnett, or any of the left trending suburban counties that have flipped across America, tells the story of Democratic politics of the last decade. The county voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 by 63%, before voting for Trump the second time by 33%.
If there was going to be any of this vaunted “suburban reversion”, this is the exact kind of place you’d be expecting to see it. Forsyth has diversified in recent years, especially in the southern end of the county, but it’s still overwhelmingly white. More importantly, the reason the county swung so hard left is white voters changing their minds – it wasn’t because of some fanciful notion of changing the electorate, but making parts of the electorate swing left.
The theory that there would be some suburban reversion was always fanciful dogshit – a lie peddled by people who do not understand that what has happened in the US is not a Trump effect, because if it was it wouldn’t be happening everywhere fucking else – but this was the test. And the GOP fucking failed it, with Walker only winning it by 32.5% despite a substantially redder environment.
The story of why the GOP failed to win Georgia, either in a 50%+1 sense or even in the sense of how any other state uses the term, is simple – there’s too many voters like the ones in Forsyth. Not everyone in Forsyth fits this bill, but the group of Romney 2012-Biden 2020, and Romney 2012-Trump 2020 voters who are considering voting Democratic now in a way they never did before – probably something like a third of the county’s electorate – fit a type. They’re socially liberal and pro-choice, they were uncomfortable with homosexuality 20 years ago and intensely relaxed about it, and they’re well off financially.
The interplay of social liberalism and money was always a difficult one, but when the party of the economic left and taxing the rich were not meaningfully different on social issues, these voters voted for their economic interests. If you were a pro-gay rights rich man in Forsyth in 2008, and you had Obama saying marriage is between a man and a woman and proposing to repeal a sizable chunk of the Bush tax cuts and cost you a ton of money, no shit you voted for the tax cuts. Now that Democrats have become more socially liberal, and the dividing lines have become so much more vast, the cost – to your sense of self, to your idea of who you are and what you stand for, to your very soul – increases. And for many, that price is now too high.
The problem for Republicans in Georgia is the inverse of their success in Ohio – the voters who have won them Ohio are deeply uncomfortable with the modern world, and are voting for the party that promises, implicitly if not explicitly, that the old days can be brought back. The GOP’s ascendent coalition is people who find themselves unable to react to the very real fact that the world I was born into and the world as it is today are functionally unrecognizable. That fact doesn’t scare the GOP’s descendent coalition, because they support a lot of the things that have changed in the last twenty five years.
Georgia is the best microcosm for this, because the voters who have moved left in the last decade and the ones who will join in the next just aren’t long term viable Republican voters under the GOP’s current lines of attack. It is fundamentally a lot harder to hold retrograde and offensive views on race and homosexuality when you work with a multiracial work force and exist in the sorts of circles that higher income people exist in. It is harder – and hell, for federal office, nearly impossible – to get people whose golf buddy from the office is Black and the couple who hosts weekly Canasta night is gay. It just is.
Whether you do this by 2020-21 turnout level by county, demographic swing from the exits, % of the electorate from the Atlanta metro, or just acknowledge the fact that Jon Ossoff went from losing by 1.8% to winning by 1.2%, the same conclusion comes from the last runoff – the electorate gets more educated, and that’s curtains for Herschel. It’s also the lesson of the ’08 Senate runoff, but what got ignored by most dumbasses last time around was that the GOP did better with educated whites then than they did with rural whites. When turnout in a runoff drops off, it drops off more amongst those who are the least likely to remember there’s an election happening – and shocker, the level of information amongst voters tends to correlate to education, and therefore vote intention.
The GOP don’t even have an argument in this runoff, which matters when you have the higher bar to dragging your voters out to the polls. The original goal was for this runoff to be a GOP victory lap, the icing on the cake in the same way Louisiana was in 2014, but the GOP in the rest of the country shit the bed. Then the goal was for it to be about Senate control, because then it would be nationalized to a greater degree and force Herschel-skeptical Republicans to swallow their pride and turn out and vote for him. Now, for some people, the fact they voted for him not because of enthusiasm, but the feeling of necessity, will stop them from doing it again.
This piece starts with Rush Of Blood for a reason – the book that I’ve now indelibly linked it to in my head is a story of a lot of other things, but it’s a character study in part of the people who make up the Global Fucking Realignment and more importantly, of Forsyth. Forsyth is a place that’s fascinated me for a long long time, and as it steps up to take its place in the national spotlight, there’s no better place to explain why Georgia is going to stay blue.