It’s not as easy as it used to be for Georgia Republicans to claim they’re a red state. Last year they won the gubernatorial election and races for Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Agriculture Commissioner, Insurance Commissioner, Labor Commissioner and School Superintendent. The new census-produced House district went very strongly red (62% to 38%). They control the state Senate 33 to 23 and the state House 102 to 78. But Biden beat Trump in 2020 and both U.S. senators are Democrats.
Republicans say Trump screwed up the party and that once he disappears, everything will go back to “normal.” Unfortunately for them, Trump has redefined “normal” in Georgia politics. The MAGAts are no longer a fringe; they’re right at the heart of the party, which has helped the Democrats continue growing. Yake a look at this map from the Wall Street Journal showing the growth of the Democrats’ presidential vote in the Atlanta area since 1996.
Yesterday, Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Lindsay Wise wrote that Georgia is now ground zero for Trump exhaustion. And you know what’s probably coming this week. Unlike in most of the country, “there are signs that voters have tired of the 2020 election replays and of Trump himself…Trump fatigue is pervasive in Georgia, Republican campaign strategists warn, especially among suburban independents and some disenchanted Republicans. ‘What has he done to net a single new vote since 2020 here?’ complained one Georgia GOP consultant. ‘The reason he lost in 2020 were white suburban voters in Atlanta. They were over it then, and they’re certainly over it now.’”
Popular GOP Gov. Brian Kemp leads the faction urging the party to stop obsessing over the last presidential contest or risk losing the next one, the same way Trump fatigue depressed Republican turnout and alienated suburban voters in the past two elections, costing the party key Senate races.
Biden won the election in Georgia by about 12,000 votes out of five million cast, making Trump the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state since 1992. Trump rejected the loss, claiming fraud. He and his allies unsuccessfully pressured Kemp, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who oversees elections, Atlanta-based U.S. Attorney Byung Pak and others to investigate and overturn Biden’s win.
Trump’s attacks on state Republicans and the election process in Georgia helped depress the Republican vote and enhance Democratic turnout in two Senate runoff elections in January 2021. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won those contests, giving control of the 50-50 Senate to Democrats, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking ties.
Two years later, Trump backed failed primary challenges against Kemp and Raffensperger, causing further GOP division. And Trump-endorsed GOP candidate Herschel Walker, an ex-football star, failed in his effort to unseat Warnock, with Republicans again losing in an expensive, closely watched runoff that handed Democrats a 51-49 Senate majority.
Today Kemp largely ignores the state GOP, with many in the party continuing to espouse the belief that fraud somehow played a role in Trump’s loss…
The University of Georgia surveyed 983 likely Republican primary voters in April and found Trump led the Republican field in the state by double digits. But the poll also contained warning signs: Even among the Republican Party’s most involved voters in Georgia— those who are likely to participate in a primary— about 15% would look elsewhere or are undecided in the general election if he is the nominee.
In the same poll, 25% of likely Republican primary voters in Georgia said Trump has had a “mainly negative” impact on their party.
Georgia Democrats said they, too, were tired of rehashing 2020 but were eager to see indictments against a man who they believe tried to disenfranchise them.
…Biden’s team views Georgia as a priority for 2024; he has visited the state several times and Democrats have invested heavily there since 2020.
Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager of Biden’s campaign, called Georgia “crucial” to the re-election bid. Fulks, who managed Warnock’s 2022 race, said he wasn’t concerned about voter fatigue, saying: “What happens when people win, they feel more invested. It makes it easier to organize.”
You looking for backward... but don’t feel like going all the way to Arkansas or Mississippi? Take a gander at Coffee County in rural south-central Georgia, population 43,000. The county hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 when they backed former Georgia governor, Jimmy Carter. In 2020, Coffee County gave Trump 10,578 votes (69.53%).
Meanwhile, CNN reported yesterday that Fani Willis has proof— in the form of emails and texts— that Trump’s legal team (Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell) was directly involved with a breach of the Coffee County voting system in Jan. 2021, “a top-down push by Trump’s team to access sensitive voting software… part of the broader push to produce evidence that could back up [Señor Trumpanzee’s] baseless claims of widespread fraud. While Trump’s January 2021 call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and effort to put forward fake slates of electors have long been considered key pillars of Willis’ criminal probe, the voting system breach in Coffee County quietly emerged as an area of focus for investigators roughly one year ago. Since then, new evidence has slowly been uncovered about the role of Trump’s attorneys, the operatives they hired and how the breach, as well as others like it in other key states, factored into broader plans for overturning the election.”
