Some Election Analysis
While we wait, here’s some info that I thought was of note. MAGA Fraudster Bill White claimed that candidates loyal to Buckhead City won the proposed Buckhead city area. They did not, every Democrat carried the Buckhead area.
Back in 2018, Abrams carried the Buckhead territory by 13%. In 2020, Biden carried it by 23%. This year, Warnock was the big leader, crushing Biden’s margin, winning by 25.4%. Abrams saw her margin REALLY go down - she only carried Buckhead by 6.5%. Charlie Bailey and Jen Jordan led the middle of the pack, Bailey won Buckhead (over Burt Jones, the one statewide candidate stupid enough to be for Buckhead city) by 14.6% while Jordan defeated Carr by 13.0%, similar to Abrams’ ‘18 margin.
The fiction that Buckhead is some sort of Republican territory still is really blown out of the water by that fact that even Bee Nguyen prevailed over Raffensperger there by 0.8%. That kind of result, a popular Republican who led the ticket in margin not winning Buckhead would be unthinkable as recently as 2016 when Isakson easily carried the region and Hillary barely won it.
Even Dana Barrett in the Fulton Commission race that was centered on Buckhead defeated longtime Buckhead mainstay Lee Morris by 0.5% (Barrett racked up huge margins in the midtown Atlanta portion of the district and defeated Morris overall by 9%).
Now, what about the black vote? Well to keep this Atlanta centered, let’s look at how the various candidates did in Districts 10+11, the core black areas of Southwest Atlanta that have historically been super-important to city elections. I have argued separately, including during last year’s mayor’s race, that the center of gravity in city elections is actually now the east side/midtown, but historically 10/11 battled it out with Buckhead to see who would win.
Ok so in 10/11, Warnock received 96.6% of the vote, Abrams received 95.6%, Bailey/Jordan received 94.5% and Nguyen received 92.2%. So at least when it comes to black voters in Atlanta, the much feared slippage did not occur. It seems likely to me that Walker and Kemp did perform a little better than expected (but crucially probably not better than Trump) with rural black voters, who are more conservative (and also probably much less likely to turn out in a runoff). But with the core black voters in Atlanta, these are very strong numbers - including for Abrams.
Abrams problems were with the kind of white voters who were once Republicans (or independents) but are very open to voting for Democratic candidates. It was also a real folly for Abrams to personally direct so much national money to the SOS race, as these voters consider Raffensperger to be somewhat of a hero who did the right thing in standing up to Trump. They crossed over during the primaries to vote for Brad+Brian, they weren’t going to change their mind in the general election. Meanwhile, very little national money made its way to someone who actual tried to steal the election (Jones) and someone whose PAC paid for robocalls encouraging people to overtake the Capitol on J6 (Carr). Perhaps Democrats will learn out lesson going forward that politics is about prioritizing where you spend to win and not just making us feel good about ourselves.
For those asking, if you know someone who wasn’t able to meet the registration deadline for the general but registered during October or before Nov 7, they can now vote in the runoff. I believe early voting will start after Thanksgiving.