Georgia's Missing Black Voters
Before the modern era of Georgia Democratic politics was ushered in by the candidacy of Barack Obama, the black share of the electorate (as defined by the voterfile) hovered between 20-25%. I believe it peaked at 25% in the 2004 Presidential election (the first big year of early voting, when we were sitting at the DPG encouraged by news helicopter footage of long lines queued outside Clayton County voting sites).
Barack Obama was a game changer. Way back then, I updated an internal server with a very early version of a website similar to the fantastic TargetEarly site which showed the early vote counts each day. People (including the GA Obama campaign) used an IP Address to look at the numbers each day and could split it by county, CD, and legislative district.
Early voting that year got up to 35% black share and we wondered if we could finally win. Well, election day was a lot whiter (sound familiar?) and the electorate ended up around 31% total. Obama got 47%. Not enough for a win but way closer than we'd been before. People like Roy Barnes, Thurbert Baker and others looked at that and the early successes of the Obama administration and thought the state was ready to flip back.
Well, it wasn't, but for a decade we did keep the black share of the electorate between 28%-31%. The two Obama elections were the highest but '10, '14 and '18 midterms all hovered around 29% black share. Years after Obama ran, the consistent black share was joined by a growing Asian/Hispanic and other share, plus a large unknown. White share of the electorate continuously shrunk.
2018 was the new high water mark for Democratic candidates with Abrams and a few others getting close to 49%. John Barrow and Lindy Miller even ended up in runoffs (where they also got 48%+ of the vote). At the time, I argued that the close runoff result should be the most frightening data point for Republicans, as it signaled that Democrats were making strong gains with the MOST reliable voters and not just on pure demographics in a high turnout election.
2020 came along and the black share of the electorate actually slipped to 27% but something amazing happened - Joe Biden won Georgia and both of our US Senate races went into a January 5th runoff. In the runoff the black share grew closer to 28% and both Senators cleared the 50% mark.
That's why it's so surprising that with about 99% of votes accounted for in the data file, the '22 general election's black share was only 26.3%. The lowest it has been since the Obama era started, and barely higher than the 2004 Presidential election - when John Kerry lost by more than 15% to George W. Bush.
What's doubly surprising is how good many Georgia Democrats, particularly Raphael Warnock were at persuasion. They took an electorate that was nearly 2% whiter than the '21 runoff and still managed to come in first. Other Democrats like Jen Jordan and Charlie Bailey would probably be in a runoff with an electorate that looks more like the runoff or the '18 electorate.
So that's great. But what stings is that Warnock was about 50k short of winning outright and there were around 160k fewer black voters than in the runoff. Just a fractional return rate for the more than 280k black runoff voters who didn't show up would have put Warnock over the top and avoided a costly runoff. (There were about 120k black voters who showed up in '22 who didn't vote in the '21 runoffs, so 280k missing + 120k new voters = 160k short).
Democrats will need to do some soul searching. We have a party leader who is billed as the expert on registration and turnout and had unlimited resources and yet saw a black share of the electorate almost 2% less black than 2018. To the extent that there has been a Democratic civil war over the last six years in Georgia, it has been between one camp which argue that there are no swing voters and another that argues that persuasion is important in addition to turnout, or, as I would actually argue that persuasion actually drives incremental turnout. If swing voters like your candidate, marginally attached base voters probably also like the candidate and are more likely to turn out.
Kudos to Warnock's campaign for really going all in on persuasion. Now that we've seen this red wave turnout confirmed, it's all but a certainty that we wouldn't be in this runoff if the Republicans hadn't nominated such a bad candidate in Walker and Warnock hadn't gone all in on his advertising in highlighting the support he had from all types of Georgians.