SurveyUSA Poll Shows Substantial Lead for Trump in Georgia

“They pay no attention to the fact that the party is pulling left as fast as the GOP has been pulling right/apart. ”

That’s literally not true. The party is center-left, more liberal on some issues like Criminal Justice or social issues than the 1990s, but the fact of the matter is they passed Mitt Romney’s health care bill, not Ted Kennedy’s or Bernie Sanders. And the establishment, centrist candidate didn’t just win the nomination, she won it in a landslide. Sanders spent nearly Two Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, more than the rest of the non-Trump GOP field combined. And he still lost. By a ton.

Moreover, she got her strongest support from the most-regular Democrats. Self Identified Dems backed her in nearly every primary outside of New England or Appalachia, where they defected for very different reasons. Sanders’ best support was from indies and young voters, and Clinton’s from the old reliables: People who self-identify as Democrats and the true base of the Democratic Party, African-American women. When Sanders tried to wade into various primaries this summer, his chosen candidates went down hard. There’s absolutely zero indication of the kind of primary panic that has been dominating internal GOP politics for the last eight years. By comparison, not only has the Trump wing of the party, such as it is, won the nomination, it’s winning the fight within the Republican electorate: Compare his and Ryan’s favorables among GOP voters. It’s not his party anymore.

“As such, the new Democratic message is actually turning off a lot of what used to be their base. ”

See, that’s missing the point about the whole thing entirely. The ‘old Democratic Base’ isn’t coming back. If you look at 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton did slightly better outside of the extended Atlanta metro than he did inside it. The old Democratic winning path in Georgia, pioneered by Jimmy Carter in 1970, was the rural yellow dogs and African-Americans (in Atlanta and in the Black Belt) vs. the Suburbs. (The pattern even held in Georgia for the 1980 Presidential campaign. Carter won the state by 15 points, but lost Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton by wide margins). That breakdown survived on the local level and Senate Elections up until the Barnes ’98 campaign. By four years later, the old yellow dogs had all either died or started voting locally like they did nationally, and Democrats were toast statewide. But outside of Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, no other Democrat could even get close to that coalition in a Presidential election after 1960. (Even while you can make the claim that Perot helped Clinton in Georgia, because he almost surely took entirely from white voters, Clinton still did several points better in Georgia than Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, or Kerry.)

While Democratic Presidential candidates still can’t assemble that coalition, they’ve also stopped trying. In 2008 and 2012, President Obama received 46.9% and 45.1% of the vote, roughly comparable to the 45.8% Clinton pulled in the state in 1996. However, the source of those votes is very different. In ’96, Clinton won Fulton/Cobb/Dekalb/Gwinnett by 50.2-44.3 (+47,900 votes). He lost the 30 counties of suburbs and exurbs that the Census now calls Metro Atlanta by 47.6-45.7 (-70,550), and he lost the rest of the state minus Atlanta 46.3-46.0 (-3,600). The non-Atlanta parts of the state decisively turned against the Democrats in the Bush years; Gore lost them 57.1-41.8, and Kerry lost them 61-38.5. In just two cycles, the GOP margin in non-Atlanta Georgia went from 3,600 votes to 314,000, with the result that Gore and Kerry lost the state by double digits.

So, in 2008, Obama changes all that: He loses the state by just a little over five points. But more importantly is where he changes all that. Outside of the Atlanta metro, he still lost the state 57-41. The yellow dogs aren’t coming back. Instead, he kept it close by winning within the Atlanta metro, carrying F/C/D/G 59.7-39.3, racking up a 271,000 vote margin that made him the first Dem to win the 30 counties since Jimmy Carter, 50.6-48.4. He won the metro by 48,800 votes while losing the rest of the state by 253,000. So the base for getting close again in Georgia races isn’t about ‘alienating the base’ but attracting the Atlanta one: Diverse, urban, and suburban. To say “Oh, they aren’t gonna win back the good ol’ boys” is to miss the point. Dems are competitive in North Carolina and winning Virginia because they’re attracting those kind of voters, not because they’re trying to replicate Chuck Robb or Terry Sanford’s coalition. The next Democrat who wins Georgia, their map isn’t going to look like Roy Barnes’s or Zell Miller’s, it’s going to look like Obama’s, with a bit more blue seeping out of Atlanta.

As it stands, Andrew’s point that the Dems have been relying on ‘Demographics’ rather than building up party apparratus holds true, but it’s worth noting that these gains have, at least on a national level, come in spite of that. Obama made a massive leap on Kerry while barely investing in the state, and Clinton has held close without doing much either. Unlike Arizona, the other ‘reach’ state much in the news, they haven’t been dropping surrogates here. (Indeed, that decision making process may be as much about the relative successes and failures of the challengers to Isakson and McCain as anything else; spending $$ in Arizona can pick you up a Senate seat and some House ones. Spending $$ in Georgia this year gets you bragging rights, but nothing down ballot). In the longer run, Dems, at least in General Election years, will be competitive in Georgia. That first win is always the hardest though; Georgia should have gone GOP on a local level probably a decade before it did, but Zell Miller and the rest of the local party managed to hold on. But once it happens, a lot of money can flow into party building real quick; just compare how much Sonny spent in 2002 vs. 2006.

Yeah, betting Gwinnett is more Dem than the state as a whole (if not blue) is a pretty good bet for election night, as it’s been trending that way, notably even getting more blue in 2012 even as the rest of the state got less.:
2004:
G: R+32.2%
GA: R+16.60%
2008:
G: R+10.30%
GA: R+5.20%
2012:
G: R+9.22%
GA: R+7.83%