What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Recently on the Politics podcast, the crew talked about why Georgia isn’t like other battleground states.

It’s likely that tonight’s Senate races will be so close that we can’t point to one thing that lifted one party or a single candidate. But so many interesting crosscurrents of politics are happening in these races — here are some of the big questions I have on my mind:

• Did having a pastor as one of their candidates help inoculate Democrats from the usual charges from Republicans that they are too culturally liberal? Or did Warnock’s fairly blunt sermons about racial issues give Republicans a way to paint both Warnock and Ossoff as too left wing?
• Can a Democrat who is not a moderate white Protestant man win in the South? (Ossoff is Jewish, Warnock is Black.)
• Can Trump-style identity politics win you the primary and also not push you so far right that you lose the general? Loeffler was expected to be a more moderate Republican, but ran to the right In November to finish ahead of a fellow Republican in the initial election and ended up being a fairly Trump-y candidate.
• Is proposing to give people money a great way to win votes? The Democrats went hard on pushing the idea of $2,000 stimulus checks in the final days of the campaign.
• Are the suburbs in places like Georgia less Democratic-leaning when voters are not voting against Trump, like in the 2018 midterms and in November?
• Do all the various anti-democratic shenanigans by the Republicans over the last two months affect voters?
• Are voters fine with divided government — or even prefer it — even though it leads to so much gridlock?

These are important questions. But I would be hesitant to answer any of them if one of the candidates wins or loses by 2 percentage points. If say, Ossoff and Warnock won by 7 points though, yes, it would probably suggest that Democrats don’t always have to run moderate white men in the South to win — at least not in Georgia. But if these races are fairly close, as expected, the takeaways from them will be somewhat limited.

And we also just got about 96,000 absentee votes in Gwinnett County (the Atlanta suburbs). Ossoff won this batch 70 percent to 30 percent, and Warnock won them 71 percent to 29 percent. Biden won Gwinnett absentee ballots just 66 percent to 33 percent, so that’s a pretty good sign for Democrats.