Did your county help push Georgia Democrats to U.S. Senate? Look inside the data
Georgia voters did something last week they haven’t in 20 years — elect Democrats to the United States Senate.
How did Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win? Strong, early Democratic turnout built the challengers a lead they never relinquished. While statewide voting records were set, Republicans saw more of a drop off than the state’s blue voters.
Senator-elect Warnock’s margin of victory over Sen. Kelly Loeffler was more than 93,000 votes, as of Tuesday morning. Ossoff led former Sen. David Perdue by more than 55,000 as the final few ballots trickled in. (Counties finalized their tallies Friday evening. Those margins have changed slightly.) Once the pair is sworn in, it’ll be the first time since 2003 that both of Georgia’s senators are Democrats.
*What you see in 2020, I think, is Democrats have refined and honed in their mechanism in Georgia,” said Chris Grant, a political science professor at Mercer University. “And part of that process is that you try to get your folks to vote early and follow up with them repeatedly to make sure they vote.”
Democrats got to the polls early
Democratic voters came out in strong numbers and went to the polls early, giving Warnock and Ossoff a healthy lead before Election Day.
More than 3 million Georgians voted early by mail or in person, breaking previous runoff voting records. Mail-in ballots gave Warnock a nearly 400,000 vote lead over Loeffler. Of the roughly 1,080,000 mail ballots, 68% of them went to Warnock.
The early, in-person numbers were much closer, but Warnock captured about 40,000 more votes from the more than 2,000,000 total. Election-day votes went overwhelmingly to Loeffler, but it wasn’t enough.
Democrats modeled their efforts after organizers in states like North Carolina and Florida in the wake of the 2014 elections. Former gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and others in the state deserve credit, Grant said.
Abrams founded the voter registration groups New Georgia Project and Fair Fight. Abrams no longer heads the New Georgia Project, but the organization was part of a larger team that helped register 800,000 new voters in the roughly two years following her gubernatorial loss in 2018. A majority of them were people of color and Georgians under the age of 30, Abrams told NPR in a November 2020 interview.
“The Democrats have been urging their people to get used to doing early voting, in part because it gives so many opportunities to vote,” Grant said. “They’re checking you off their lists each time, and they’re gonna call follow up with you over and over and over again, to make sure you voted.”
More Republicans skipped the runoffs
Overall ballots cast in January broke runoff records, but Republican turnout saw a steeper drop off.
Voters cast a little over 5,000,000 ballots in the Nov. 3 general election, compared to nearly 4,500,000 for the runoffs. Perdue, who nearly won outright on Nov. 3, had about 249,000 fewer votes cast for him in the runoffs, as of Tuesday. Ossoff, by comparison, saw only a drop of about 106,000.
Both candidates lost votes in the Atlanta area with Perdue seeing a more than 19,000 vote drop in Gwinnett County. But, Perdue’s vote losses in the mountains and northwest Georgia also hurt his reelection bid. In Cherokee County, voters cast about 9,200 fewer ballots for Perdue in January than they did in November.
Warnock earned about 19,000 more votes than Ossoff, a majority of which came from Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. Perdue outperformed Loeffler by roughly the same margin in the same counties.
The 2020 trend runs counter to previous Senate runoffs, Grant said.
In 2008, it was Democratic voters who stayed home as Jim Martin failed to unseat Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss. In 1992, Republicans returned to the polls, sending Republican challenger Paul Coverdell to victory over the Democratic incumbent Wyche Fowler. Much like Ossoff’s victory, Coverdell trailed Fowler in the general only to win the runoff.
“The Republicans are pretty reliable to return to the polls,” Grant said. “And there’s some reason for depression in Republican turnout in the runoff. And I think the reason for that is the president.”
Donald Trump had two effects on Republican efforts in Georgia. Early voting efforts were not as heavily pushed due to Trump’s claims of fraud stemming from the Nov. 3 election, and the president’s attacks on top state Republicans like Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger likely turned off irregular Republican voters, Grant said.
In the weeks leading up to the runoff, Trump called on Kemp to resign because the governor refused to interfere in the election. In a phone call published by the Washington Post, Trump pressured Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes — one more than President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state and expressed concern that Republican voters wouldn’t turn out for Loeffler and Perdue.
“I think that when you’ve got the incumbent President of the United States — the leader of your party — saying that elections are rigged and it doesn’t matter what you do, the Democrats are going to be able to put a fix in on it,” Grant said.
What’s next?
Warnock will be on the ballot again in 2022 alongside Georgia’s gubernatorial race. Kemp could face a challenge from within the Republican party. Abrams, his Democratic opponent in 2018, could run again. Trump has already said he will campaign against Kemp.
Republicans remain in control of Georgia’s General Assembly. But the schism within the Republican Party could result in Democrats winning more statewide races in Georgia, Grant said.
“This was the story of Republican advancements back in the 1960s and 1970s in the South,” Grant said, “That’s how Republicans oftentimes got elected the first time because the Democrats were so split asunder.”
This story was originally published January 14, 2021 at 5:50 AM.