Following the 2016 elections, I found cold comfort in the knowledge that at least Trump lost Cobb County. I wrote at the time:
TL;DR: Clinton won Cobb, it’s a big deal, the Cobb County Republican Party is remiss if they don’t have a serious come-to-Jesus conversation when the national celebrations subside, and the Cobb Democrats are remiss if they don’t seriously consider finding candidates for every race in the county. Cobb is no longer a reliable GOP vote machine.
Since then, the Cobb Democrats have flourished; their monthly meetings are typically a packed house (and they’re held in a very large meeting room). Strong candidates are challenging GOP incumbents in several districts that were unopposed in prior elections. Most notably, Democrats showed up to vote yesterday in numbers that dwarfed previous gubernatorial primaries. From the Marietta Daily Journal:
In 2010, the gap between Cobb voters who cast a Democratic ballot in the governor’s race and those who cast a Republican ballot was over 37,000 in the GOP’s favor. In 2014, it was over 28,000 in Cobb.
On Tuesday, only 251 more votes were cast in Cobb for a Republican gubernatorial candidate than for a Democrat, according to unofficial results.
Cobb GOP chair Jason Shepherd told the MDJ that there’s “been some amount of laurels-resting in the Cobb GOP,” but indicated that he believes the fact that the Democrats are rapidly gaining strength in Cobb County will motivate the county’s GOP base.
The negligible gap between GOP and Democrat turnout yesterday indicates that Clinton’s 2016 win in Cobb was not just fueled by an anti-Trump backlash, and November 2018 will give a clearer look at what we can expect to see in Cobb moving towards 2020.