The Lessons Of Georgia

What We Can Learn From Georgia

Why did Jon Ossoff win Georgia in 2021 while Stacey Abrams lost it in 2018, despite a more favourable political environment and lower turnout? Most people seem to be avoiding this simple question, but the answer is crucial to understanding how to move forward with Democratic politics.

If you think that the two years of Abrams' activism between 2018 and 2020 was what did the trick, then your answer is that had the timelines been flipped, then the same results would have been there. You might say that Brian Kemp as a non-incumbent was a harder candidate to beat than David Perdue as an incumbent, but that goes against most people's beliefs (both about Kemp and about incumbency writ large). You could even go to the well and say that the last two years of Trump have hurt the GOP, but then why did House Republicans make the gains they did.

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Jon Ossoff, in winning Georgia by about 0.8% (with maybe a couple of tenths of a percent to grow that lead outstanding), a 2.2% improvement on Abrams' 1.4% loss in 2018. Why did he do better than her? It was definitely partially overperformance in the Black Belt, with Stewart County - an Abrams +16 county - an obvious example, where Ossoff won by 23%. Obviously I'm not stupid enough to think that it was Ossoff who managed to stretch that margin - much more responsible would be Raphael Warnock, who managed to get rural Black turnout activated in a real and substantive way. However, it wasn't just the Black Belt where Ossoff outperformed Abrams, it was the white exurbs of Atlanta and rural white areas downstate.

Focus on three extremely white exurban counties and you'll see why Abrams lost while Ossoff won. Hall, Cherokee, and Forsyth are all blood red counties, but they're not nearly as blood red as they used to be. In Hall, Abrams lost by 48% two years ago, while Ossoff managed to close that gap by 3% to a 45% loss. In Cherokee, Ossoff cut the GOP margin by 4.5% - again, against a 2.2% swing statewide - with an impressive performance, and in Forsyth, a whites-only county until the 1990s, Ossoff outperformed Abrams by 6.6%. 

Head south of the metro and you'll see a similar pattern - Effingham County, just north of Savannah, went from a Kemp +54.9 county to a Perdue +48.6 county, a stellar 6.3% overperformance for Ossoff. Ware County, an unwieldy county that runs from the Florida border north, saw Ossoff outperform Abrams by 4.3%. That was what did it for Ossoff.

We don't have any meaningful exit poll data yet - the unweighted Edison data is currently trash - but it seems inescapably true that Ossoff and Warnock will have done markedly better with white voters than Abrams did - a fact that is true of Biden's 2020 performance as well. That fact isn't meant to disparage Fair Fight or Abrams' activism - and yes, I want Abrams to be the next Governor of Georgia, desperately - but it is the case that Abrams lost, and the genuflecting at her altar from white liberals is more than just a bit pathetic.

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Why does it matter? It's a fair question - the need to assign "proper" amounts of credit is mostly superficial, no? Isn't it just about vanity and ego?

Nope.

If Democrats want to win, they need to learn the lessons of both their victories and their failures. As someone who so badly misjudged two of the biggest failures of 2020 - Texas and Florida - I'm trying to avoid proclaiming the Unified Theories to solving them, but Georgia, the lone bright star of my forecasting cycle, can get my attention. Georgia was a truly impressive result - a continuation of efforts to shift the state left even relative to the nation, a feat that few thought was possible even 6 months ago. Blue Georgia and red Florida would have seemed nonsensical even as late as early October, and while Crystal Ball ended up there at the end, it was a controversial belief.

Properly understanding how we go Georgia from where it was to where it is is crucial to flipping Texas and holding onto places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If we want to win back Florida or North Carolina, wouldn't an accurate assessment of the road to take be better than just blithely saying that we need to find "Florida's Abrams," whatever the fuck that means?

It was Cobb and Gwinnett and Forsyth and Cherokee that flipped the state, and while those counties are getting more diverse, it was the white voters within those counties - and others like it - that did the job. Obviously, the support of Black people is the only reason that Democrats have even a shot in hell of winning states like Georgia, but we have to assess what has changed from the beginning of the last decade to the beginning of this one, and it wasn't a spike in Black voters (as a share of the electorate) that flipped Georgia. It was the fact that Michelle Nunn lost whites with a degree by 43% in 2014 and Joe Biden lost them by 22%. The change has been with educated whites, and that's actually good news for Democrats. Given that's the cause of the Georgia result, then it's replicable, repeatable, and frankly, not going to require much issue to even the most radical of agendas.

There are some people who want a roadmap to win Georgia again, and to continue to win elections in tough but winnable states. There are some people who want to merely genuflect at the altar of the saviour, of the Great Person who did the thing. If you want to feel like a good person, then sure, go ahead with the latter. But if you want to win elections and make the lives of people better, then you must acknowledge that Democrats winning Georgia ran through flipping white voters. Ask activists and organizers how to convince middle-to-upper income white Americans that Democrats are the party they should support, and you'll see the beginnings of the roadmap to take to Collin and Denton, to the WOW collar, to the Triangle, and even to reach places like Anchorage or Johnson County.

When Jon Ossoff won, I felt a happiness I forgot I could feel, because we had won the Senate. There's a roadmap to winning more in Georgia's results, and I never want to forget that feeling again. We just need to learn the right lessons.