Georgia, and the Tale of Three Runoffs

Rev. Raphael Warnock & Jon Ossoff (both D-GA)

Politics in 2020 is always weird, but it's particularly strange when it comes to the Republican Party's outward-and-inward focus.  While Donald Trump is living in his own land of make-believe, most congressional Republicans, certainly Republicans that have jobs in January, are more focused on the reality that Joe Biden will be the next President & Nancy Pelosi will be the next Speaker of the House.  As a result of these two things, the Democrats will have a trifecta control of the government if they can win the Senate, which is possible if they pick up both of the Georgia Senate seats in January.  Donald Trump has made the conversation about this difficult.  You see it in mailers that spell out the facts of the race.  They will claim "Kelly Loeffler & David Perdue are the only way to stop the Democrats" which in some ways is true (if they don't win, the Democrats will control the Senate), but it's implicitly disregarding the national argument that Trump has a shot.  After all, if Donald Trump has won reelection, then there's a Republican in the White House, and Vice President Pence has already guaranteed that the 50 Republicans in the Senate will give the Republicans control of the body (a tie only matters to the R's if Kamala Harris is the Vice President) regardless of if Perdue & Loeffler join them.

This could make campaigning difficult, and it throws another wrench into a race that's already unpredictable.  Georgia recently went for Joe Biden, the first Democrat to win the state for President since 1992, and the first Democrat to win statewide in the state at any level since 2006.  This would imply that the Democrats can win the state...in theory.  In reality, the Democrats have an uphill battle.  Conventional wisdom states that Democrats generally underperform in runoff or off-cycle elections in terms of turnout, and that's true (we'll talk about that in a second), though they also have done well with Trump in office during off-cycle or even midterm elections.  One of the stranger things about not acknowledging that Donald Trump has lost, or by making Trump (and not the incoming Biden administration) the most important figure in the Georgia special election is that Loeffler/Perdue need to either have Biden voters not turn out in as great of ratio as they did in November (achievable, but risky) or they need tepid Biden supporters to vote for them (difficult if they're seen so publicly backing the president's efforts to invalidate Biden voters' votes).

I am not going to make a prediction in this race, as I have lost some confidence in public polling (even though Georgia polled surprisingly well), but I am going to talk about the race, and three examples of runoff elections where we might find clues about this race.  Generally, as you'll see below, Republicans have over-performed in runoff elections, and even with the Senate majority on-the-line, not as many people will vote in January as did in November (which makes a base play for both sides smart-it's not so much about catching crossover voters as it is getting as many of the Biden or Trump supporters for your side out).  Special elections in a state as tight as Georgia is politically are simply turnout operations.  We don't have a lot of examples of competitive runoff elections, but below we'll talk about three of them in two of the states that allow runoffs: Georgia & Louisiana.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA)

2002 Louisiana Senate

Believe it or not, just six years ago ruby-red Louisiana had a Democratic Senator, and that woman was Mary Landrieu.  Landrieu held her seat through three terms, but never had easy reelections, and one of the toughest was in 2002.  Louisiana has what's sometimes referred to as a jungle-primary, where all parties compete against each other, and the top two finishers (regardless of party) advance to a runoff unless no one gets 50%+1 of the vote.  In 2002, the Democrats had a truly awful midterms.  Despite George W. Bush being in the White House, they lost seats in the House (this may have been a contributing factor Rep. Dick Gephardt stepping down as House leader, though this may have just been kismet to go along with his planned run for president), and they lost their Senate majority.  When first-term Sen. Landrieu could only reach 46% of the vote in the initial round, many Republicans assumed that Louisiana Elections Commissioner Suzie Terrell would win the runoff, capping off their victory.

This didn't happen.  Landrieu didn't have the opportunity to properly run against Bush (who was popular in her state), and unlike Perdue/Ossoff, she couldn't claim to be a check on the power of President Bush (at least in terms of keeping the Democratic Senate majority, which was already gone).  But, Landrieu had an ace up her sleeve.  At the time, Louisiana's sugar industry (an important agricultural product in the state), was struggling due to foreign competition.  The Bush administration had been in talks with Mexico to allow more export of Mexican sugar into the US, costing more jobs in Louisiana.  Landrieu made this the centerpiece of her campaign-an issue she could run against Bush on, and one that Terrell couldn't counter without upsetting her base.  It worked (Landrieu won the runoff by 3-points), and might be an indication of what Loeffler/Perdue are up-against here, though unlike the sugar policy (which the Republicans tried to make disappear long enough to get Terrell elected), the Trump administration won't be able to maintain the illusion that Trump has a chance at the White House until January 5th (since the electoral college will have already elected Joe Biden by then).

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)

2008 Georgia Senate

Louisiana is the best-case scenario for the Democrats-Georgia in 2008 is the worst case.  In 2008, the Democrats won massive victories across the country, winning back the White House, and increasing their margins so much in the House & the Senate that a filibuster-proof majority was in reach in the latter race...with everything coming down to Georgia.  Freshmen Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) won the plurality of the vote in November, but he didn't hit 50%, meaning that he and State Rep. Jim Martin (D) would go into a runoff election.  Were Martin to have won, the Democrats would've gotten their supermajority straight out.

This didn't happen.  While the initial election was close (Chambliss led by 3-points, a modest but not insurmountable margin to overtake in a runoff), the runoff wasn't.  Chambliss won by 16-points.  The reason he was able to underline this was A) Georgia was a redder state in 2008 than it is now, obviously, since despite a national headwind for Sen. Obama he couldn't win the state and B) Chambliss was able to run a traditional campaign to serve as a "checks-and-balances" against the coming administration.  While it occasionally seems self-defeating (because it rarely means anything actually gets done), swing voters tend to gravitate toward a divided government, and Chambliss offered that with his campaign.  Combined with a huge drop-off in African-American turnout, Martin's campaign was DOA in the runoff.

Rep. John Barrow (D-GA)

2018 Georgia Secretary of State/Public Service Commissioner

Our final race I want to profile is not a Senate race, but the most recent pair of runoffs in Georgia for Secretary of State and Public Service Commissioner.  In 2018, the Democrats had a strong performance nationally, picking up a number of governor's mansions and control of the US House.  It was a strong enough push that while they didn't win statewide in Georgia, they were able to get two races (the Secretary of State seat and one of the races for Public Service Commissioner) into a runoff-the race for SoS was particularly competitive, with State Rep. Brad Raffensberger (R) only beating former Rep. John Barrow (D) by 16,000 votes in the initial count.  But both of the Democrats (Barrow and Lindy Miller) lost their runoffs, by almost identical margins (roughly a 3.5-point loss, slightly larger than their initial count).

Part of this was attributed to lack-of-interest, as the big-ticket race in Georgia (the gubernatorial contest between Brian Kemp & Stacey Abrams) barely missed out on a runoff, which meant that there wasn't a huge draw for the runoff.  All four of the candidates (both Republican & Democratic) in these races received 1 million less votes a piece in the runoff, meaning that over 2 million people who voted in these races in the general election didn't bother to turnout for the deciding runoff-that wouldn't have happened with a higher-ticket race (like Abrams, or, the Senate races this January).

All of this is to say that the Democrats are in a tough position.  By January, it will be inevitable that Joe Biden will be president to even the most stubborn of Republicans, so that won't be an issue that Democrats can really milk (though Donald Trump will likely be shouting "fraud" even then).  The checks-and-balances will be in play, and the GOP will have the advantage in a runoff (in theory).  If the Democrats want any sort of hope, it's in the fact that Georgia & Louisiana in these races are not what Georgia in 2020 was-a state that had just elected a Democrat.  It's telling that in 2018 the two Democrats were able to keep their margins relatively close (though there was still a drop) between the general & the runoff, and that turnout (which was on the Democrats' side in the general) was what cost them.  The Democrats will need to find a way to get that turnout, and recapture the magic that got them a surprise win on November 3rd; in order to do so, they're going to need to buck history once more.