Gwinnett Is Seen As a Battleground in Turning Georgia Blue
Rumors that the Clinton Campaign is considering whether it should compete seriously in Georgia aren’t new. The Washington Post brings up the prospect in a lead story this morning, framing the question as one of whether the Democrats should ensure their win, or try to expand the electoral map to reliably red states that Democrats haven’t won in a generation or more. From the Post story:
In Georgia, where the last Democrat to carry the state was Bill Clinton in 1992, there’s a clear sense that the contest is more meaningful than in recent cycles, said Michael Smith, communications director for the Georgia Democratic Party.
“Instead of using Georgia to mobilize people to go to North Carolina, they’re staying in our state. It’s night and day,” Smith said.
A win for Clinton would almost certainly have to involve Gwinnett County, long a Republican stronghold, but one that saw the number of white registered voters dip below 50% this year. That diversity was present at the recently concluded Gwinnett County Fair, where both Republicans and Democrats had booths, and which the Post visited:
The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won the presidency in the Peach State was 1992, with Bill Clinton. 24 years later, voting for 2016 gets underway with in person advance voting starting today.
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Jon Richards
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Surprisingly, Gwinnett in recent elections has been a pretty good barometer for the state as a whole (in terms of Georgia’s overall voting). In 2012, Romney won the county by a 54-45% margin over Obama, very close to Romney’s overall 53-45% win in the state. In the 2014 Senate race, Perdue led Nunn in Gwinnett by a 54-44% margin, close to the statewide average of 53-45%. The county is 26% black in voter registration, pretty close to the 29-30% black average for Georgia in recent years. With the continued decline in white registration in the county, as minority registration continues to go up, and depending on votes cast for Libertarian Gary Johnson, Clinton at the very least should come close to winning the county (with 5 points), perhaps with an outside chance to narrowly carry it. I would agree that if she is to win Georgia, she has to win both Cobb and Gwinnett, though winning both would not necessarily guarantee her a statewide win.
I would say she doesn’t necessarily have to win both, but has to win one (likely Gwinnett) and cut the other margin down close enough (i.e. it doesn’t matter if she wins Cobb by 2,000 votes or loses it by 2,000 votes), but she can’t lose it by the 30-40,000 that Obama lost it by. If she’s cutting the GOP margin from those two counties (Which was 66,600 in 2012 (~22% of GOP statewide margin) and 59,400 in 2008 (~29%) to next to nil, that’s something that bleeds into its neighbors both Dem (increasing her margin in Fulton/Dekalb) and GOP (shrinking his margin in Forsyth/Cherokee/Hall). It wouldn’t guarantee a statewide win (she still has to overcome a ~250,000 vote margin in the non-ATL metro parts of the state unless rural GOP turnout falls off a cliff). Running well in the ATL suburbs is where, if she does it, she gets the margin to win the state.