What Happened This Week In Washington — And Georgia

Going back to the GOP turnout question: Beyond Trump not being on the ballot, I also wonder about the simple deflating effect of losing. That is, Republicans just lost a presidential race. There’s usually a backlash against the president’s party in the first midterm, but that’s two years later — enough time to get over a loss and motivate yourself again.

To use a sports analogy: I grew up an Eagles fan, and they seemed to lose in the NFC championship game nearly every year. For the next two weeks, I’d tell myself I was done following football, but I would eventually rally behind the team by the start of the next season. We’re still in that two-week, I’m-still-bummed phase, maybe? (If you’re curious, when the Eagles finally won the NFC title and then lost the Super Bowl in 2005 I actually did stop following the NFL for good, soooooo … 🤷 .)

Stacey Abrams is not on the ballot tonight, but she helped recruit Warnock to run and campaigned hard for Biden, Ossoff and Warnock this fall. She is also expected to run for governor again. That campaign would likely start this year, though, with the election in November 2022.

I would have said it’s Abrams v. Brian Kemp again. But as the Atlanta-Journal Constitution’s Tia Mitchell hinted at when she came on the FiveThirtyEight politics podcast earlier this week, it’s not clear that Kemp will make it to that match-up. Kemp won the 2018 nomination for governor in part because Trump endorsed him. Now, Trump is essentially promising to endorse a Republican challenger to Kemp, because Kemp has not backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. Meanwhile, I think Abrams clears the Democratic primary field if she runs, assuming that Ossoff and Warnock, who are running campaigns that mirror her 2018 gubernatorial run, don’t somehow lose by like five points or more.

So we are now in this weird situation where the incumbent governor of a state (Kemp) might be less likely to be his party’s nominee than a person who holds no political office (Abrams). I would still probably bet on Abrams v. Kemp, though. And if that does happen, it will be the fourth major campaign (2018 gubernatorial, 2020 presidential, 2020 Senate run-offs, 2022 gubernatorial) where Abrams is a central figure for Democrats in Georgia.