GA-07: Rep. Rob Woodall will not seek reelection

[Adam Griffin]

I'd like to think I'm usually a fairly realistic person when it comes to the performance of the GOP in the South, and what chances both they and Democrats have in various places.

With that being said, I see no viable, realistic path for the GOP to hold onto this seat. Gwinnett is one of those places where even somebody like me can turn their head for a few months and already be out of touch with how much demographic shift and growth has occurred in a broader area. It's changing faster than SoCal. It's changing faster than NoVA. I'm not sure there's even a place anywhere in the country that is comparable to it in this regard (maybe another area within the broader metro).

Democrats won't need it to be a good year for them to win. Hell, the GOP could probably win the House PV and this district would still have a decent chance of flipping. Besides the huge rate of demographic turnover and growth, this is also ground zero in GA for Latino and Asian voters (who, while turning out in big numbers in 2018 like everybody else, still lagged the electorate as a whole - their turnout will be higher in 2020, with or without Abrams).

[Adam Griffin]

Part of Forsyth County is going to have a Democratic Representative. Holy sh!t.

Hell, not just part: like 75% of the county's population, lol.

[Adam Griffin]

Part of Forsyth County is going to have a Democratic Representative. Holy sh!t.

Hell, not just part: like 75% of the county's population, lol.

Wasn’t Forsyth one of the counties with the biggest swing between 2012 and 16?

It definitely had the biggest swing of any GA county in 2016 (15.81 points). Throughout the Old Confederacy, there's only one other jurisdiction I eyeball that swung more to Clinton (Arlington, VA; 19.4 points).

[Adam Griffin]

I'd like to think I'm usually a fairly realistic person when it comes to the performance of the GOP in the South, and what chances both they and Democrats have in various places.

With that being said, I see no viable, realistic path for the GOP to hold onto this seat. Gwinnett is one of those places where even somebody like me can turn their head for a few months and already be out of touch with how much demographic shift and growth has occurred in a broader area. It's changing faster than SoCal. It's changing faster than NoVA. I'm not sure there's even a place anywhere in the country that is comparable to it in this regard (maybe another area within the broader metro).

Democrats won't need it to be a good year for them to win. Hell, the GOP could probably win the House PV and this district would still have a decent chance of flipping. Besides the huge rate of demographic turnover and growth, this is also ground zero in GA for Latino and Asian voters (who, while turning out in big numbers in 2018 like everybody else, still lagged the electorate as a whole - their turnout will be higher in 2020, with or without Abrams).

Just because I consider you a fairly neutral and informed observer of Georgia politics, I'll ask: how would you rate Woodall's 2018 campaign operation?  A lot of GA Republicans didn't think he put forth much effort and I think that's a major reason why Woodall is retiring.


As for GA-07, yes it's an increasingly diverse district but let's not conflate Gwinnett County trends with GA-07 trends.  The most Democratic parts of Gwinnett  aren't even in GA-07, and Buford and Sugar Hill are still rabid pro-Trump exurbia that will be turning out for him big time in 2020.

His campaign was s[inks]t - but people place too much value in campaign quality, in my opinion. This is one thing that both sides do equally (i.e. beat themselves up over campaigns), but especially in an area that is ground zero for national R-to-D shifts, I really doubt it made much of a difference. Most voters weren't following the election intently until after Woodall started trying anyway. If anything and in the ATL metro, losing an incumbent just cost the GOP far more votes in this race than Woodall's bad campaign or maybe even Donald Trump (at least between 2018-2020). Expect this to follow a GA-6 like trajectory now where it lurches at least a few points to the Democrats relative to 2018; even with an incumbent to help stop the bleeding, that happened in GA-7 last year (in my view, though, Woodall's name being the one on the ballot held back some of that).

I wasn't kidding about turning your head for a short time and being completely out of the loop with Gwinnett's transformation. Just look at the 2014/16/18 precinct map: Gwinnett has like 140 precincts or so; nearly 20 flipped between 2016 and 2018 alone (but look at the shade shifts even in the GOP precincts in Sugar Hill, Buford, Dacula, etc).



I loaded up DRA just to see what the 2016 block groups showed: two-thirds of the county's residents lived in majority-minority areas (green) then - and I guarantee you that many block groups' white majorities have already fallen since; wouldn't surprise me if less than a quarter of the county's population is in white-majority block groups. Even in the areas you mentioned, rapid transformations are under way (if anything and at this point, it might even be more dramatic there in terms of YtY shifts):

[Adam Griffin]

Sure, this will flip if you believe that 2018-2020 is going to follow the same pattern as 2006-2008.  But, if it's a more neutral environment, somewhat like 2010-2012 with the parties flipped, it will stay Republican.  I don't think we will be in store for another D+8 election.

The only way this starts out as anything more favorable to the GOP than Lean D is if there is a complete reversal of the 2016-18 trends among suburbanites and minority turnout manages to be even more anemic than 2016. The demographic turnover and white suburban hemorrhaging is just too intense to be countered and this is ground zero in terms of areas where incumbency has a huge impact on shoring up GOP vote share among the latter group.

By and large, the GOP has only held up in Gwinnett this long because of sky-high turnout from suburban college-educated whites and the fact that a disproportionate share of the likely Democratic voting bloc is contained within low-propensity minority voting groups (Latinos & Asians) and/or non-citizens.

[Adam Griffin]

Although maybe Gwinnett isn't built out since it added another 120,000 since 2010.

The further out (from Atlanta) parts of Gwinnett still have lots of places with room to grow.

Yeah, Gwinnett should be able to easily accommodate another 300k people without any substantial upzoning. The Atlanta Regional Commission expects 1.35m to live in Gwinnett by 2040, and will be the largest county in the state by then.

Also relevant:

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