Georgia In Play: From Likely to Lean GOP, Plus, How Will Counties Vote?
The projections are pretty much what one would expect, with the GOP taking most of the state’s counties. Metro Atlanta Democratic strongholds of Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton and Rockdale counties show Hillary Clinton winning by more then a 10% margin. (Clayton is the highest, at 74%). Other strongholds include Athens-Clarke County, Chatham and Liberty Counties, and the so-called Black Belt stretching from Augusta to west of Albany. Counties with between a 5 and 10% Democratic margin include Baldwin, Dooley, Douglas and Early. The narrowest margins for Clinton, at less than 5%, include Baker, Chattahoochee, Henry, Mitchell, Webster, and Wilkinson.
For the Republicans, counties with between a 5 and 10% margin include metro Atlanta’s Cobb and Gwinnett, along with Brooks, Decatur, Jenkins, Lowndes, McIntosh, Taylor, and Wilkes. GOP counties on the bubble with less than a 5% margin for Donald Trump include Henry, Madison Meriwether, and Screven. ShareBlue’s overall prediction for the state is Trump +3.5%, which aligns with recent polling. But as others have noticed, the last polls of Georgia were back in September, before the debates and revelations about Donald Trump.
Which brings us to Larry Sabato’s University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. In this week’s Crystal Ball, editor Kyle Kondik moves the Peach State from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, citing close polls and the report yesterday that the Clinton campaign is considering increasing its efforts here. But, Kondik warns, “Clinton win in Arizona or Georgia would be evidence of a Clinton rout that matches or exceeds Obama’s seven-point 2008 romp.” Nationally, the Crystal Ball predicts a Hillary Clinton win, with 341 electoral votes to Donald Trump’s 197. If it’s any indication of how polarized the race has become, there are no no toss up states in their ratings.
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Jon Richards
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If trump loses Georgia, it’ll be the biggest failure in state GOP leadership in recent memory.
I’m not a fan of our current state leadership, but it is pretty hard to sell a turd sandwich.
Is FUlton an intentional typo? People have been saying FU to Atlanta for years.
Some thoughts:
(1) Henry County goes for Clinton, the first time since 1980 that the county has voted Democratic for president. Henry gave two-thirds of its votes for the second President Bush in 2004, but only 53% for McCain in 2008 and 51% for Romney in 2012. Two years ago, Jason Carter won the county (for governor), the first time since 1990 that the county had backed a Democrat for governor. Henry is approaching 40% black in voter registration, by the 2020 presidential election, Democrats may have a 10-point+ margin in the county,
(2) Gwinnett County will be close–Obama lost it by 9 points last time, but that was a big improvement over 2004, when John Kerry lost the county by 32 points to W. If Gary Johnson gets enough votes from the GOP, maybe an outside chance Clinton can win Gwinnett—something no Democratic presidential candidate has done since Jimmy Carter a long 40 years ago.
(3) I don’t think Madison County (outside of Athens) is a GOP county on the bubble—I mean, in 2012, Romney got 76% in the county, topping 60%+ in all 12 precincts (and over 80% in a few of them).
(4) Rockdale County, just east of DeKalb, may be a margin 20+% for Clinton this time. The county is now 49% black in voter registration—a cusp short of majority status, which would make it the third majority-black county in voter registration in metro Atlanta, along with of course Clayton and DeKalb.
(1) You’re dead right on Henry. Easiest bet on the table for a county that’s going to flip in the state.
(2) Gwinnett is even closer than you’d think. Look how it’s changed since 1992/96, the last time GA was close, up to now:
1992: Bush: 81,822 Clinton: 44,253 Perot: 23,926 (54.4%-29.4%-14.6%)
1996: Dole: 96,610 Clinton: 53,819 Perot: 10,236 (59.3%-33.0%-6.3%)
2000: Bush: 121,756 Gore: 61,434 (63.7%-32.2%)
2004: Bush: 160,445 Kerry: 81,708 (65.7%-33.5%)
2008: McCain: 158,746 Obama: 129.025 (54.6%-44.3%)
2012: Romney: 159,563 Obama: 131,879 (54.0%-44.6%)
So first, you can see just how much impact population growth has-the total vote has doubled in 20 years. The other thing that sticks out: Even as Obama was doing worse nationwide and statewide in 2012, he still narrowed Gwinnett a little bit. (Cobb, which had a similar jump from ’04 to ’08, going from R 62-37 to R 54-45, slid back to R 55-43 in ’12) to So it was always going to be closer this time. Looking at 538’s estimates of where Trump’s repulsion to white college educated voters, (http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/clinton-trump-vote-maps-2016/), in a hypothetical where one out of every five whites without a college degree who voted for Obama in 2012 defected to Trump and if one out of every five non-whites and college-educated whites who voted for Romney in 2012 switched to Clinton, Gwinnett would be a county that switched from Red to Blue.
Here’s the thing about that: Even with the reduced margin, it was still Romney’s 5th best county in the state by raw vote margin (behind Cherokee, Forsyth, Cobb, and Hall: Together, Romney won the counties by 208K, 2/3 of his statewide margin). What do those five counties, that collectively make up Atlanta’s northern suburbs, have in common? According to 538, in each county, 30-42% of Romney voters are college-educated whites or non-whites: Groups that are turned off by Trump and might defect to Clinton or stay home. So if Gwinnett is going blue (or 50-50), that kind of shift is likely to show up in various degrees in the other four (not to mention the GOP parts of Fulton/Dekalb, where Romney lost the counties but still got 200,00 votes). Gwinnett may have gone closer no matter what because of demographic change, but if it’s close enough to go blue, the reasons why are going to eat into the other GOP powerhouse counties where they build a statewide margin.
(2) (a) It’s amusing to realize that the inner suburbs and their counties on which the Dems are relying on to possibly win the state for the second time since 1980 are the main places Reagan ran well in against Carter. (The only counties he won were mostly around Atlanta: There he won Cobb, Gwinnett, Douglas, Rockdale, Clayton, and Fayette; outside the metro he won Columbia, two counties in South Georgia, and a handful in the mountains/around Chattanooga as Carter won the state 55-41.) How things change…
(3) Agree on Madison. Not sure what they’re seeing, unless 5,000 UGA professors moved into town during the last four years. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Georgia,_2012) erroneously has it as a 57-42 Romney county; hope that’s not where these guys are getting their data.
(4) Agree on Rockdale. Noteworthy among the counties that flipped from Super Red to Blue from ’04 to ’08, Rockdale swung the hardest and has kept going. Douglas and Newton went from 61-38 and 62-38 Bush to 50-49 Obama but then went only a little bit further in 12, ending up 51-48 and 51-49. Rockdale though, jumped from 60-40 Bush to 54-45 Obama to 58-41 in ’12. No reason to think it won’t jump some more this time as it solidifies itself along Fulton, Clayton, and Dekalb as part of the Democrats’ African-American Atlanta core.