Who will win the GOP runoff in Georgia?

[Adam Griffin]

The "Georgia Tea Party" has already demonstrated their incompetence and insignificance in the state by failing to get one of their candidates into the runoff, leaving two "moderate" corporatists to compete for the nomination. They're not energized in this race, and pretty much a non-factor. It's the same dynamic/reason why even the Georgia extremists never allow the craziest of bills to come to the floor like many other Southern states have (the guns thing doesn't count; that's normal here). Most understand the precarious position the Republicans have and have had here; this state isn't nor ever has been that Republican, and they're not willing to risk it by going balls-to-the-wall crazy.

It's hilarious to see each of them attacking one another for the same things - things like Common Core, felon contributions, stimulus money and being out of touch - that they are both guilty of in reality. Perdue is "unhinged", making gaffes and has shown his propensity for temper-tantrums all through the race. He has a solid floor of support distributed evenly throughout the state, but that solid support is probably no more than 40%. Kingston's probably sitting at around 50% right now; they'll split undecideds.

When you stack that against the fact that virtually all of the establishment Republican brand in Georgia is backing Kingston - plus the CoC and perhaps even a majority of the "Tea Party" - Kingston wins it by 10.

[Adam Griffin]

FYI, here's a two-way support map (plurality) between Kingston/Perdue in the May 20th primary. Yes, it makes Perdue's chances look good, but I think Tmth gave the best brief explanation as to why that could be deceiving.

[Adam Griffin]

Yeah this is ridiculous; he just took the lead for the first time since polls closed.

[Adam Griffin]

Yes, I give up trying to predict that Georgia's Republicans will do. In my defense, a Kingston win was quite unanimously believed likely by Georgia's politicos as well. Here's what I think happened:

I'd argue that Kingston's negativity, in a rare instance, backfired on him more than anything. In areas where he had no competition on the airwaves, it worked (Kingston ran ads for months in my media market of Chatt/NW GA; Perdue didn't; this is why Kingston won that weird patch of GA), but in ATL, he just sounded like a whiny ass compared to Perdue, who actually did run some positive, issue-based ads.

In the end, though, that two-way map above and tonight's results look pretty dang similar.

[Adam Griffin]

Yeah, that took about 10 seconds to make...