What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia
The big question tonight is which party will control the Senate for the next two years, to state the obvious. But taking the long view, the future of the electoral map is also at stake. Democrats have lost significant ground in the Midwest, to the point that states like Ohio and Iowa aren’t really competitive for them anymore. If they are going to keep losing ground in the Midwest, they need places like Georgia (or Arizona) to be regularly competitive for them, or even squarely in their corner going forward.
More than 98 percent of the expected vote is already reporting in Webster County, according to The New York Times. (On the other hand, that happened very fast — it could just be a reporting error.) Loeffler and Perdue are both winning there 56 percent to 44 percent, whereas Trump won the county 54 percent to 46 percent in November. That would be a good sign for Republicans, although I want to emphasize that this is just one tiny, rural county.
What I’m Hearing From Republican And Democratic Officials In Georgia
Earlier I bounced the idea that Trump’s antics have harmed Republicans in the race off a top Democratic official involved with organizing in Georgia — an official who doesn’t hesitate to blast Trump, mind you — and I was struck by his response: “Total B.S.”
His sense is that Trump’s infamous boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue holds – that is, if he tells his base to vote for someone, they’ll vote for that someone, even if it isn’t intellectually consistent with claims of voter fraud or rigged elections.
His view is whoever wins or loses will have far more to do with Georgia’s demographic transformation than anything Trump has said or didn’t say about the race or the candidates.
To that end, Democrats say that the things they’re doing differently this time, in terms of door-knocking and registering voters who didn’t vote in November, will be make-or-break for Warnoff and Ossoff. Specifically, Democrats are proud of the door-knocking they’ve done in Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, where they think a few thousand votes could be the difference-maker.