Before last Tuesday, there was all sorts of Democratic Party angst and outrage over GOP efforts to steal the presidential election in Georgia.
There was State Election Board trickeration, lawsuits and endless accusations of fraud. But all the while, the Republicans’ secret plan was to do it the old-fashioned way: Get more votes.
Granted, their guy is a nasty sort, given to fear-mongering and serial prevarication. So, one overarching plan was to remind voters what a louse he is and they would be swayed. Right? After all, Georgia, a swing state, famously helped evict Donald Trump from the White House in 2020.
Just days before this election, there were signs that momentum was breaking Kamala Harris’ way. A poll showed she was leading by 6 points in Iowa, a state previously out of reach for Dems. And Trump had been acting unusually squirrelly (even for him) on the trail, a sure sign he knew he was done.
Then came Election Day.
In retrospect, the “signs” of Democratic victory were just whistling past the graveyard.
Trump’s victory wasn’t a “landslide” in historical terms. But it was solid and complete. He won all seven swing states — six that were won by Joe Biden — with margins ranging from .9% (Wisconsin) to 5.5% (Arizona). The seven wins came from a total margin of about 750,000 votes, not a lot in a nation that cast 140 million votes. But enough to cement a victory.
Georgia was in the middle of that pack, with Trump winning 50.7% to 48.5% — or by 116,000 votes out of 5.3 million cast.
Speaking on the AJC’s “Politically Georgia” show, Congresswoman Nikema Williams, the state Democratic Party chair, noted they just didn’t get enough bodies (live ones, that is) to the polls.
“It’s a turnout game and we had to turn out more voters; we didn’t get that done yesterday,” she told my colleagues. She said Georgians are either R or D and that not many are independents. So it’s a numbers game of getting them out.
But, she added, “We were fighting the couch; a lot of our voters simply stayed home.”
Apparently, Democrats have comfier couches. Or at least, Harris wasn’t compelling enough to get them to stand up, dust the crumbs from their laps and get to the polls.
“Georgia’s not a blue state or a red state, it’s a periwinkle state, y’all, and now we have more work to do,” Williams said.
I have debated just how “periwinkle” Georgia is with my AJC bud, Greg Bluestein, author of “Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power,” a tome about the 2020 election.
The book is about Joe Biden narrowly beating Trump and then, two months later in a runoff election, Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defeating two incumbent Georgia senators, um, Flipping the U.S. Senate.
In 2022, Bluey’s treatise seemed to be confirmed when Warnock defeated Herschel Walker, a revered running back but a hot mess as a candidate. He was perhaps the only Republican in Georgia that Warnock could have beaten that year.
Aside from those examples, Democrats running for statewide posts in Georgia have largely gotten trounced since at least 2008.
In 2020, Trump was a damaged candidate reeling from — among other things — the pandemic. And then his lies and pouting after his narrow defeat helped Ossoff and Warnock sneak in during the runoff.
In fact, statewide Democratic candidates in 2022 lost by an average of more than 6%.
In retrospect, those Democratic victories appear to be aberrations.
Interestingly, in comments similar to those from last week, Congresswoman Williams told me after the 2022 election: “We have a serious turnout problem in the Democratic Party. You have to turn out voters. We haven’t done that.”
Well, it wasn’t for a lack of trying this time around.
A recent Associated Press story said the Harris campaign had more than 40,000 volunteers and 220 staffers working across Georgia, knocking on more than a million doors and doubling that in phone calls.
As to Democratic turnout, Georgia wasn’t bad this time. Harris got about 66,000 more votes than Biden received. However, Trump added 195,000 votes to his 2020 total.
By comparison, Harris got less votes in the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan and Pennsylvania than Biden did and got just 37,000 more this time in Wisconsin. (The two candidates carpet-bombed Georgia’s airwaves with ads compared to last time around.)
DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who in 2006 as Labor Commissioner was one of the last Dems to win statewide, noted that “Trump’s supporters were obviously more motivated. You have to provide a rationale for voters to turn out and need to appeal to broader swath of voters.”
Despite all of Trump’s flaws, “if there’s high inflation, voters historically punish the incumbent party,” Thurmond said.
In that stead, Democratic state Rep. Scott Holcomb said Trump’s pending incumbency might create a silver lining to the incredibly dark clouds hovering over the Georgia political landscape.
He noted Ossoff will be up for re-election during the 2026 midterms, which historically don’t bode well for the party in office.
“I would not be surprised if that’s a good year,” Holcomb said.
If you’re a Democrat in Georgia, you’ve got to take your small victories where you can.
