Georgia's Very Own Megathread! (v2)

[ON Progressive]

Is Stacey being single an issue for her? I know some black voters can be pretty traditional.

No. Voters won’t care about her relationship status.

[ON Progressive]

Bronz, you seriously need to stop posting this garbage.

[ON Progressive]

[ON Progressive]

Crosstabs of the poll here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ajc-isabetai/polls/AJC+Election+Poll+Results.pdf

I am rounding with all the numbers, as this poll uses >DECIMALS.

Gender: Kemp leads men 53/39, Abrams leads women 50/39.

Race: Kemp leads whites 65/27, Abrams leads African-Americans 86/4, "Others" (Asians/Latinos/etc) go Abrams 45/34.

Age: Abrams leads <30 voters 45/35, and 30-44 year olds 61/29 (!). 65+ go Kemp 54/39

Party ID: Abrams leads Dems 90/2, Kemp leads Rs 91/4, Indies go Abrams 46/31.

Favourables: Kemp 40/32, Abrams 34/21.

Seems like there's a trend throughout the poll of Abrams leaning groups having more undecideds than Kemp's groups. That is pretty good news I would say.

[ON Progressive]

I don't think yard signs do a whole lot (or we'd have Congressman Ossoff), but I agree that they may at least get the candidate's name out there.  Something I've complained about recently is that Abrams seemed to have gone quiet -- no TV or radio ads, signs, or other outreach that was visible to me.   Kemp has been mostly unopposed with TV ads during the times/stations I watch, although last night I did finally see an Abrams ad on channel 11.

Pretty much from the beginning, Abrams herself has said that this campaign wouldn't be one won or ran based on TV ads, radio spots and so forth. The reason so many areas are getting field organizers and energy pumped into them is because that money isn't being pumped into expensive ATL media market ad buys. There will come a day where both can happen, but a win statewide will be needed before that happens. Much like with the sign stats I posted above, TV and radio spots are essentially a never-ending black hole of resource entrapment for campaigns; as long as you can keep the disadvantage to 2:1 or less, there's arguably no negative impact (or positive impact if you're on the winning side of those odds). Even if you're outside those odds, effective field and abundant enthusiasm can easily overcome deficits created by it.

Furthermore, it seems pretty obvious that the campaign is also pursuing (or at least benefiting from) a stealth approach alongside this; they don't want the extent of their investment to be immediately known or visible to every GOP operative and voter. Based on the universe of voters being targeted, it's not difficult for that to be the case. While I still disagree with the strategy of effectively abandoning persuasion efforts, they are reaching out to large numbers of registered voters.

Abrams deciding on no persuasion gives me serious pause

How many persuadable voters are there in GA though? It's a state where the overwhelming majority of voters are either evangelical whites or black voters.

[ON Progressive]

The absentee ballot push looks to be great strategy--especially for the minority population centers.  I spoke with a lady today working DeKalb County--they have received close to 7000 ballots so far.

How does that compare to previous years?

I don't know--it sounded pretty good!

Have they received actual ballots or just applications for a ballot?

According to this there were 8,283 votes by mail in DeKalb in 2014 and Jason Carter won 66 percent of them.

It is applications, not ballots received (my bad).  They are running almost double at this point in 2014.  Of course, many applications are never sent/not in time, but we could be looking at 15,000 ballots by Election Day (and I would think a higher percentage than Jason Carter's 66), as this is a specific voter strategy by the Abrams campaign.

Cool! And the VBM applications were specifically sent to low propensity voters who skip midterms, so I don't think a significant increase in vote by mail in Abrams-friendly territory would be cannibalizing the early in person voting or Election Day voting at all.

I feel like the "cannibalizing the election day vote" thing is a total myth in the first place, honestly.

[ON Progressive]

I feel like the "cannibalizing the election day vote" thing is a total myth in the first place, honestly.

How come? It totally makes sense why it would happen. In 2016, the Clinton campaign had us pushing people to do early voting hard (at least in my area), so I know for sure I got a lot of first-time early voters to go, or at least so they said. It stands to reason that people who may have voted on election day vote early once or twice, and then they start to build a habit of it. This becomes compounded when a campaign's strategy is built around pushing early voting.

I don't buy that it's a thing that has an impact on election results because pretty much all early voters are/were either:
a) going to vote on election day anyway if it weren't for early voting, which means they're not harming the candidate because they would've voted for said candidate
b) unable to vote on election day, but if they could, they would've vote for the candidate. This means they're actually helping the candidate by voting early
c) wouldn't be voting at all if it weren't for early voting, which means the candidate is being helped.

[ON Progressive]

I find it interesting that the northeast corner of the state (Towns/Rabun/Habersham/Stephens) are mostly early votes.

Do you have any idea of why that might be?

[ON Progressive]

https://twitter.com/TPM/status/1050849181924040704

Brian Kemp bringing on the dog whistles, just as you would expect from a Republican.

[ON Progressive]

It wouldn't be a Georgia election w/o Fulton County screwing everything up and having "computer issues"

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The entire department needs to be canned.

Why can’t there just be paper ballots rather than incredibly insecure and glitchy machines? Oh right, it’s Georgia. They might actually be the worst state at running elections in the union, and that takes effort.

[ON Progressive]

JMC has Abrams up 47-46 in GA-07: https://www.scribd.com/document/391316947/GA-07-Polling-Memo-Rob-Woodall-vs-Carolyn-Bourdeaux-October-2018-Bold-Blue-Campaigns-with-JMC-Analytics-and-Polling

[ON Progressive]

https://twitter.com/WestmorelandATL/status/1056759775814434818

[ON Progressive]

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but Oprah is coming to Georgia to campaign with Stacey Abrams! Woot! Woot!

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/oprah-campaign-democrat-stacey-abrams-georgia-n929411

I wonder how much of an effect that will have. Oprah is very popular with minority voters and with women, especially white women. So she might be able to push some support to Abrams, like she did with Obama back in 2008.

Well, considering she is going to knock on doors, she might cause some heart attacks while canvassing.

[ON Progressive]

Today's demographics (154k voted):
https://twitter.com/gtryan/status/1057844660931047424

Also, 65k (over 4 in 10) of those 154k voters didn't vote in 2014.

[ON Progressive]

Still, after all this time and all the work that's obviously been happening everywhere...it really hits you that Georgia is now a truly competitive state when you remember that Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey and Mike Pence are all making campaign stops in the state in the same 24-hour period.

I just hope it doesn't get stuck in the category of "Always close but never goes D unless it's a really good year nationally" like North Carolina seemingly has.

[ON Progressive]

Still, after all this time and all the work that's obviously been happening everywhere...it really hits you that Georgia is now a truly competitive state when you remember that Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey and Mike Pence are all making campaign stops in the state in the same 24-hour period.

I just hope it doesn't get stuck in the category of "Always close but never goes D unless it's a really good year nationally" like North Carolina seemingly has.

I could be wrong, obviously, but the massive growth in the Atlanta Metro feels a lot more reminiscent of NoVA than the Research Triangle.

What was the big difference between NoVA and the Research Triangle that prevented NC from turning into VA anyway? It seems like both of them are similarly D, but the main difference is that other metros in VA are swinging D but not really so much for NC.

[ON Progressive]

Still, after all this time and all the work that's obviously been happening everywhere...it really hits you that Georgia is now a truly competitive state when you remember that Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey and Mike Pence are all making campaign stops in the state in the same 24-hour period.

I just hope it doesn't get stuck in the category of "Always close but never goes D unless it's a really good year nationally" like North Carolina seemingly has.

I could be wrong, obviously, but the massive growth in the Atlanta Metro feels a lot more reminiscent of NoVA than the Research Triangle.

What was the big difference between NoVA and the Research Triangle that prevented NC from turning into VA anyway? It seems like both of them are similarly D, but the main difference is that other metros in VA are swinging D but not really so much for NC.

I mean Atlanta and DC are considerably larger, more established metros than Raleigh

A huge percentage of the DC Metro is outside VA though. What's helped VA is not only NoVa trending D, but also Richmond and Hampton Roads. There's nothing like that going on in NC.

[ON Progressive]

Abrams will win 90%-98% of the black vote, she will receive 20% of the white vote or less, but Latino voters look like a tossup.

This might be the stupidest thing I have seen posted today. If she isn't even getting 20% of the white vote and is only tied with Latinos, she would be losing by double digits.

[ON Progressive]

At this point, I might actually hate Brian Kemp as much as I hate Kris Kobach.

[ON Progressive]

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaDemocrat/status/1059205015397695489

Brian KKKemp is getting desperate.

[ON Progressive]

Just a reminder that TargetSmart whiffed BADLY in 2016. They were literally missing multiple states by double digits. Don't take their "modeled partisanship" garbage seriously.

[ON Progressive]

This might sound surprising to some on Atlas, but no one, especially the voters, cares about "optics". If Abrams were to drag this out to December of 2019, the voters would still forget after a month. It also doesnt help how everyone is complaining for Abrams to concede when a good 20 members of the House of Reps have still not conceded their races and have called the result a fraud.

They wouldn't forget by December 4th, when the runoff for other races is.

Nobody would vote against Barrow just because Abrams is dragging it out.

[ON Progressive]

All of this handwringing about Abrams' post-election actions will mean nothing in a few weeks.  The fact of the matter is the Democratic Party is truly ascendant in Georgia.   Need to keep the focus on getting a runoff win for John Barrow and work on 2020 at all levels.

At least you guys have somewhere to rise up.  Here in Indiana, our Democrats are basically wiped off the map and have to start clean.

We need to take out some of the excess vote out of California and New York and systematically move them to red states like Indiana (and definitely places like Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Alaska). That's 10 (!) Senate seats there.

Well, there are plenty of Chicagoans that are moving into Indiana, which helps.

The loss of Joe Donnelly is disheartening.  Makes me wonder if we're going to be a one-party state forever.

There's no such thing as a state that'll be one party forever, but it seems like it might be gone for a generation.

[ON Progressive]

Kemp is and always will be an illegitimate Governor.

How?

The only reason he avoided a runoff is through massive voter suppression.

That poster prefers to be willfully ignorant about the calculated actions of the GOP to keep “unfavorables” from voting. Don’t even bother with her.

Of course, he's a Reasonable Pragmatic Republican. Reasonable Pragmatic Republicans' motto has always been "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".

RFKFan68's beloved Stacey Abrams lost. Given his nastiness on this forum, towards me and towards many others, I am actually glad that she did. Her classless concession speech only further confirms that impression with me. And once again, my gender has been confused...

You must see that gleeful schadenfreude over someone’s favourite candidate losing is exactly the kind of pearl-clutching ‘nastiness’ you decry so often. I’m sorry about the mistaken identity, but names with an ‘a’ suffix do imply female bearers in most English/French/Spanish cases, so it’s clearly an honest mistake.

Anyway, Abrams was well within her rights to wait and let a full picture of the race develop befor she conceded. Was she overconfident? Probably. But she knew she was running against a man who was inclined and willing to disenfranchise those who opposed him, and quite rightly felt wronged by the whole affair. And without a runoff in the picture, I imagine she’d have conceded a week ago.

At this point, I've given up trying to be nice to my detractors on here. Given how they have behaved, they don't deserve any respect from me.

MUH AD HOMINEM ATTACKS

I'm pretty sure if a Democrat had illegitimately won an election by 1% you would be fuming "THE EVUL SOCIALIST DEMONCRATS STOLE THE ELECTION FROM MUH RIGHTFUL REPUBLICAN WINNER"

No, I would not be. That is a gross distortion of my viewpoints. But at any rate, the continued reactions people are giving me on here only deepens my sanctification that the Democrats failed with Abrams.

So you're happy that a reactionary like Brian Kemp won because people are upset that a reactionary won? How moderate of you!

Moderates always have and always will be useless against the far right, and that's been true throughout all of modern history.

[ON Progressive]

I really, really hope John Barrow wins the SOS runoff, even though it appears like he almost certainly won't unless black voters remain energized. That would put an end to most of this banana republic nonsense.

Agreed. Not only would Barrow be a massive improvement compared to KKKemp, it would also make me feel very good about the state for 2020 since runoffs have usually been absolutely atrocious for Democrats in the state.