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The terrifying mob attack on the Capitol on Wednesday, among its many effects, quickly shifted focus from the other big news of the week: the runoffs for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively, giving Democrats control of Congress.
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Like a lot of recent political events, the Georgia runoffs are more significant the further you zoom out the lens. In one sense, the results were not that unpredictable. The final polling averages showed both Democrats ever-so-slightly ahead, and it was clear that the races were shaping up in such a way as to make the Democrats extremely competitive.
But the Georgia runoffs were full of practical and symbolic significance. They exposed the limitations of the Republican coalition, with or without President Trump, leaving the party further in the electoral wilderness — it’s not clear where the Republican Party goes from here, especially in the wake of the violent insurrection by Trump supporters at the Capitol.
First, the significance of Georgia specifically. I’ll spare you some of the boilerplate about the more obvious implications, but having a Senate majority is a big deal. It means that Democrats should be able to confirm Supreme Court justices and President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet. They’ll likely be able to pass additional COVID-19 stimulus legislation at the very least, along with other budgetary policies through reconciliation. Other policy changes would require eliminating the filibuster — unlikely — or getting cooperation from enough Republicans. But at least Democrats will have the chance to bring to the floor election-reform bills like H.R. 1 and policies like Puerto Rico statehood, giving them a fighting chance instead of having Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squash them from the start.
And symbolically? Well, it’s Georgia. With the possible exception of Texas, no other state has been as much of a symbol of an emerging Democratic coalition of college-educated white voters and high turnout among Black voters and other minority groups. Both Warnock and Ossoff are breakthrough candidates, not the moderate, white Blue Dogs that Democrats have traditionally nominated in Georgia. Warnock, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, will become the first Black senator from Georgia and the first Black Democrat ever to serve in the U.S. Senate from the South. Ossoff will become the youngest senator elected since Biden, in 1973, and the first Jewish senator elected to the U.S. Senate from the South since the 1880s.
Then there’s the fact that the runoffs came during a lame-duck period in which — in a predicate to Wednesday’s violence — Trump and other Republicans tried to overturn and subvert the results of the election and undermine faith in the democratic process. If Republicans get the message that anti-democratic actions have negative electoral consequences, they may be less inclined to push democracy to the brink in the future.
Republicans may not take away that lesson, though. One school of thought is that because Warnock’s and Ossoff’s wins were narrow — once all votes are counted, Warnock should win by around 2 percentage points and Ossoff by about 1 point — we shouldn’t make too much of them.
I don’t find this convincing. The way political actors react to elections is usually based on who wins and loses, not on their margins of victory. For example, nobody thought that Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were brilliant politicians because they only narrowly lost in key Electoral College states.
But it’s also not clear that these races really had any business being close to begin with. Consider the following:
- Georgia is obviously a purple state now, but it’s still somewhat to the right of the country overall (Biden won in Georgia by 0.2 points compared with 4.5 points in the national popular vote). And the state has historically been redder in runoffs than in regular elections.
- Perdue was an elected incumbent (and Loeffler was an appointed incumbent, though appointed incumbents have much worse track records) whereas Ossoff and Warnock had never won an election before. Although the bonus associated with incumbency is much less than it used to be, it’s still hard to beat incumbents, especially with inexperienced opponents.
- Although the Georgia runoffs occurred under unusual circumstances, it was reasonable to think the electoral environment might resemble that of a midterm election. Typically, what happens in midterms is that voters seek out balance and the president’s party loses ground in Congress. (The “midterm penalty” we encode into our congressional model works out to around 5 points.) In this case, one might expect that to work against Biden, with voters keeping the GOP in charge of the Senate as a check against Democratic power. Instead, there was roughly a 3-point shift toward Democrats relative to the November vote.
Perdue beat Ossoff by roughly 2 points in November but lost to him by 1 point on Tuesday.
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Indeed, after Georgia, Republicans’ track record in the three general elections (2016, 2018, 2020) plus the various runoffs and special elections that took place under Trump now starts to look mediocre:
- Republicans went 1-1 in the Electoral College.
- They lost the popular vote for president twice, extending their streak to seven popular-vote losses in the past eight elections.
- Republicans narrowly lost control of the U.S. Senate, which it held 54-46 prior to the 2016 election.
- The GOP also narrowly lost control of the U.S. House, which it dominated by 247-188 heading into 2016. This had a complicated trajectory, however: Republicans lost a few House seats in 2016 and a ton of seats in 2018 before regaining some ground in 2020.
- Republicans have gone about 50-50 in gubernatorial races in major swing states, winning in Florida, Georgia and Arizona, for example, while losing in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
- On the positive side of the ledger, the GOP has done well in keeping control of state legislatures, although many of those are dependent on gerrymandering.
So, it hasn’t been a terrible time to be a Republican running for office, but it hasn’t been a good one, either. Typically, a party would be looking to move beyond a one-term president who had cost his party control of both houses of Congress. Actually, that’s being kind: Typically, a party wants nothing to do with a losing presidential candidate.
When it comes to Trump, though, that calculation isn’t necessarily so simple because of his tendency to punish his intraparty adversaries: Republicans who tried to cross him, such as former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, were sometimes forced to retire rather than face the president’s wrath in a primary.
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Yet the GOP has done especially poorly in Trump-era elections without Trump on the ballot, too. Republicans lost the popular vote for the U.S. House by 8.6 points in 2018 without the president on the ticket. And while some Republicans are blaming Trump for their losses in Georgia, the fact is that Perdue won the plurality of votes in November with Trump on the ballot but lost to Ossoff without him. Tuesday’s loss came primarily because of lower turnout, especially in red, rural counties where Trump can bring voters to the polls.
To step back a bit, the success of an electoral strategy basically comes down to four dimensions:
- How good is it at turning out the party base?
- How much does it turn out the other party’s base?
- How well does it do with swing voters?
- How efficiently is the party’s coalition configured electorally?
In Trump-era elections, Republicans have tended to do well along two of these dimensions and poorly along the other two. Namely, Trump gets very high turnout from his base. What’s just as important, rural white voters who are the core of that base have far more power in the Electoral College and U.S. Senate than their raw numbers would imply, making their coalition electorally efficient. Hence, their strategy has performed well along dimensions No. 1 and No. 4.
Conversely, Trump is extremely motivating in turning out many parts of the Democratic base (dimension No. 2). And he’s a big turn-off to swing voters, or at least he’s proven to be after four years in office (dimension No. 3). After narrowly beating Clinton among independent voters in 2016, Trump lost them to Biden by 13 points in November. Swing voters also haven’t been very happy with the GOP with or without Trump on the ballot: They backed Democratic candidates for the U.S. House by 12 points in 2018. Republicans have had especially big problems with suburban swing voters, including in places that were once GOP strongholds.
We’ll have to wait and see, but the violence at the Capitol last week may only exacerbate the GOP’s problems on dimensions No. 2 and No. 3. In the fewpolls conducted since, solid majorities of Americans overall, including almost all Democrats and a majority of independents, said the storming of the Capitol represented a threat to democracy. Similar shares of Democrats and independents said Trump and congressional Republicans bore at least some blame.
Republicans are in a fairly precarious position. At best, they are often fighting to a draw, and one that would often be a losing strategy without the structural advantages built into the system for rural voters. And if Republicans don’t get spectacular turnout from their base, everything else potentially starts to crumble. Even a modest decline in turnout from people who are pro-#MAGA but not necessarily part of the traditional Republican base can leave the GOP in a losing position.
Nor do Republicans have any sort of obvious role model for how to achieve consistent electoral success. The previous Republican president, George W. Bush, saw his second term in office end with landslides against Republicans in 2006 and 2008. A series of recent presidential nominees associated with the party establishment (Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole) all lost their elections, meanwhile. You really have to go back to Ronald Reagan for an example of an unambiguously broad and successful Republican electoral coalition, and that was a generation ago. Republicans who cast their first votes for Reagan at age 18 in 1984 will be 58 years old in 2024.
This doesn’t mean Republicans are helpless, by any means. Under McConnell and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, their congressional agenda has also been largely unpopular. If you’re consistently pushing positions that a majority of the public opposes, you’re liable to pay a price for it. Republicans’ structural advantages (especially in the Senate), and Trump’s ability to drive turnout in the places where those structural advantages matter, served as cover for a minoritarian agenda.
For all that said, the tendency of the opposition party to regain ground at the midterms is very strong. One would not want to bet that much against the GOP winning back one or both houses of Congress in 2022. (The House, where Republicans should pick up some seats from redistricting, might actually be the better bet than the Senate, where Democrats have a relatively favorable map.)
After last week, though, I’m not sure I’d want to place a lot of money on the GOP in 2022, either. If the Georgia runoffs served as a quasi-midterm, they might suggest that the GOP can’t count on the sort of gains that a party typically wins in midterms. As in the primaries leading up to 2010, the GOP is likely to have some vicious intraparty fights, possibly leading it to nominate suboptimal candidates in some races. And with the violence last week and Republican efforts to contest the Electoral College outcome in Congress, Democrats may be very motivated again in 2022, feeling — not unreasonably — as though democracy itself may be on the line.
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Why many Republicans are still attempting to overturn the election
Even with many prestigious pollsters sitting the Georgia runoffs out, there have been plenty of polls of the two U.S. Senate runoffs and they continue to show an exceptionally close race. As of Tuesday afternoon, Democrat Raphael Warnock had a nominal lead of 0.5 percentage points over Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in the special Senate election, while Republican Sen. David Perdue had an equally slim 0.4-point lead over Democrat Jon Ossoff in the regular Senate election. We aren’t planning to make probabilistic forecasts in Georgia, but it’s safe to say that a “polls-only” view of the runoffs would put each race at about 50:50.
Why many pollsters are sitting out the Georgia runoffs
What about indicators apart from the polls? While we could go through the various “fundamentals” that our congressional model considers, such as fundraising, incumbency, and state partisanship, perhaps an easier jumping-off point is simply to start with the results on Nov. 3, since it’s likely that the vast majority of voters will choose the same candidate again if they can. We’ll then consider what factors may have changed between November and how that could affect either turnout or which candidate people pick.
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Benchmarking from the November results
In the regular election in November, Perdue won a 49.7 percent plurality of the vote compared to 47.9 percent for Ossoff — that is, a difference of about 2 points. Most of the remaining votes went to the Libertarian candidate, Shane Hazel.
There was also a small handful of write-in votes.
'>1Who picks up that 2 percent could make a big difference, too, if the margins are razor-thin on Jan. 5. Ordinarily, you’d think that a Libertarian candidate’s votes would consist of mostly conservative voters who might be more inclined toward the Republican candidate in a two-way race. On the other hand, since Perdue is an incumbent, Hazel’s votes might be considered more of an “anti-incumbent” vote, which would then favor Ossoff. The AP Votecast exit poll of Georgia voters — although its sample size of Hazel voters was small — found that Hazel drew support from 2 percent of moderate voters as compared to 1 percent of liberal voters and 1 percent of conservative voters, suggesting they might be more middle-of-the-road voters instead.
In any event, it’s worth keeping in mind that Perdue won more votes than Ossoff on Nov. 3 and also that Ossoff slightly underperformed Joe Biden. The exit polls do not provide any particularly strong evidence about which sorts of voters backed Biden but not Ossoff — trust me, I’ve looked — although one intriguing clue is that Ossoff won the votes of 15 percent of voters who thought the economy was good or excellent as compared to 19 percent for Biden, a relatively wide gap. Perhaps some Biden-Perdue voters, then, were people who were relatively happy with the status quo and their personal circumstances but disapproved of President Trump’s personal conduct and voted for Biden for that reason.
Benchmarking the special election result is more complicated because of the presence of multiple Democratic and Republican candidates on the ballot in November. One method I’ve seen elsewhere is to add up the vote totals for all Democratic and Republican candidates on the ballot. If you do that, the Republicans won 47,808 more votes than Democrats in November, or a margin of around 1 point.
However, this is not necessarily ideal. The research I did for our congressional model, based on an analysis of past elections with runoffs, found that while the “total party” vote that I described above is indeed a good metric for forecasting runoff results, the margin separating the top two candidates also has predictive power. It’s relevant, in other words, that Warnock finished ahead of Loeffler by 7 points. Based on the formula we use in our model, this implies that Warnock would actually have won a two-way race on Nov. 3 by about 1.5 points.
Does it really make sense, though, that Loeffler would have narrowly lost a two-way race on Election Day when Perdue would narrowly have won his? Well, maybe. Perdue is an elected incumbent whereas Loeffler is not — she was appointed to her seat to replace now-retired Sen. Johnny Isakson — and elected incumbents generally perform stronger than appointed ones. Furthermore, Loeffler, in an effort to outflank fellow Rep. Doug Collins, the other leading Republican candidate in that race, positioned herself as extremely conservative, running an ad that called her “more conservative than Attila the Hun” and bragging about her “100 percent Trump voting record.” (Loeffler had, indeed, voted with Trump 100 percent of the time until recently, although she broke ranks with him in voting to approve the National Defense Authorization Act.) But while this may have been good messaging to finish ahead of Collins, it’s not necessarily the best way to win over suburban voters, who helped turn Trump out of office.
It’s also possible that at least some voters were voting tactically in the special election. A moderate voter who preferred Warnock to Collins but Collins to Loeffler might have chosen to use her vote for Collins on Nov. 3, figuring based on pre-election polls that Warnock was nearly certain to advance to the runoff and didn’t need her vote. Or — who knows? — some Democrats who assumed Warnock was a shoo-in to reach the runoff could have voted for whichever Republican they thought would be easier for Warnock to defeat in the runoff.
I’m not saying there are necessarily large numbers of voters in these categories. But there may be some of them. And indeed, polls of the runoffs show Perdue outperforming Loeffler by about 1 point on average. So a split verdict is possible — although probably only if both elections are extremely close — with the Loeffler race likely being the easier of the two for Democrats to win.
With those benchmarks — ambiguous though they are — established, the other big question is what could cause things to change from November. We’ll break this into two categories: (1) What could cause a shift in turnout; and (2) what could actually cause people to switch their votes.
How turnout could be different than in November
I’m not going to go into too much detail here because it’s been covered extensively at FiveThirtyEight and elsewhere, but most people’s priors entering the runoff — including mine — were that Republicans were more likely to gain ground than lose it as a result of turnout falling in the runoff.
That was for some relatively simple reasons. First, Republicans have historically gained ground in Georgia runoffs. Second, the opposition party usually has an enthusiasm advantage, and with Biden having been elected and Democrats having (narrowly) retained control of the U.S. House, Republicans are arguably the opposition party. (Although this is a big assumption that we’ll scrutinize below.) Third, Georgia — even after Biden’s win this year — is still slightly to the right of the U.S. as a whole (keep in mind that Biden won the national popular vote by 4.5 points but Georgia by only 0.2 points) so a neutral political environment there might favor Republicans.
At the very least, it’s not clear that any of these are rock-solid reasons to assume turnout will help Republicans. Precedent about past runoffs is not necessarily that informative considering Georgia has changed a lot since most of those previous runoffs were conducted — particularly in affluent, more diverse suburban counties, which have moved strongly toward Democrats. These sorts of suburban counties traditionally retain more of their turnout in runoffs, and if they do so again, that could help Democrats rather than Republicans.
Next, although Republicans will become the opposition party on Jan. 20, Trump isn’t behaving like a typical lame duck, to say the least. Instead, he remains omnipresent, both with his bullshit claims about election fraud and with what’s been an active legislative period in which Trump has already vetoed one major bill and also threatened to veto a COVID-19 stimulus package before backing down. And while there’s been plenty of debate over whether a meaningful number of Republican voters will actually follow through on callsto boycott the election, Trump’s refusal to concede could also have other, more subtle effects. For instance, it could keep Democrats feeling anxious rather than savoring their victory — and anxiety is generally a good way to raise voter turnout. Additionally, the fact that Democrats will control the White House for the next four years may not be as front of mind for independents who might otherwise be inclined to favor divided government.
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Finally, although Georgia might still lean red in a neutral political environment — if you want a more precise definition, think of that as an environment where neither candidate leads on the generic congressional ballot — it’s not clear that we’re in such an environment now. Rather, it may be that we haven’t yet exited from the November environment, which though a bit disappointing for Democrats was nonetheless somewhat blue-leaning.
Unfortunately, there have hardly been any polls of the generic ballot since November. It’s worth noting, though, that Trump’s approval rating has actually slipped a bit since the election. On Nov. 3, polls of registered and likely voters showed Trump at a -6.9 net approval rating (45.2 percent approve and 52.1 percent disapprove); that had worsened to -9.2 as of Tuesday afternoon (43.3 percent approve and 52.5 percent disapprove). While not a huge shift, this is the opposite of what typically happens in the lame-duck period. Even unpopular presidents such as George W. Bush usually see some improvement to their approval rating as they are preparing to leave office.
Democrats also have one ace in the hole when it comes to turnout. Biden won in November even though the Black vote wasn’t especially high as a share of turnout in Georgia; in fact, the share of Black voters declined slightly, relative to past elections. (It’s important to keep in mind that Black turnout was still very high overall in November, but it was also very high — or even higher — for other groups.)
So although there are many reasons to be cautious about early voting data, it’s at least intriguing that Black voter turnout represents a larger share of the electorate so far than it did at a comparable point in the November election:
The Dem strength is mainly if not entirely due to a stronger Black turnout. This has always been the obvious way for Dems to improve their standing, given relatively weak Black turnout in Nov., and while there aren't any guarantees it sure seems like it's on track to materialize pic.twitter.com/3i2jupOIn3
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) December 29, 2020
That certainly doesn’t mean that Democrats are guaranteed a turnout edge or anything like that; Republicans could easily overcome any Democratic advantage from the early vote with a big turnout on Jan. 5. But I’d put it like this: If you had a list of several signs and signals that might portend a Democratic victory for both seats, one of the items on that list would be growth in Black voter turnout in the early voting period. It’s nowhere near a sufficient condition, but it might be a necessary one, and it seems to be falling into place for Democrats.
Another question is what happens to Republican turnout when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot. Trump has campaigned on behalf of Loeffler and Perdue in Georgia, but his message at a rally earlier this month was unfocused (though he’s scheduled to visit again next week).
Could voters switch sides from November?
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Another reason to have started out believing that Republicans would gain ground in the runoffs is because voters typically have some preference for divided government — not necessarily when they’re asked about it in polls but based on how they behave in midterm elections. On average, the president’s party suffers about a 5-point penalty at the midterms, according to research we’ve conducted for our congressional model. And it can be larger when the president’s party also controls both branches of Congress, as in 2010 and 2018.
Again, though, that assumes that voters will be thinking about who will control the government on Jan. 20. And they may not be doing that, given how active and atypical the lame-duck period has been with Trump refusing to concede. The chaotic debate over the stimulus package for the past few weeks has also not been the best advertisement for divided government.
Another question then is: What happens to the handful of Biden-Perdue voters? If they were moderate Republicans who were voting for Biden as a repudiation of Trump but are not necessarily on board with the Democratic Party’s agenda, they may be fairly thrilled with how the election went down in November and will vote for Perdue again to preserve divided government. But if they were voting for Perdue because he was an incumbent — elected incumbents do retain some loyalty from voters, although less so than in previous eras — they could, in theory, vote for Ossoff now that they know control of Congress is on the line. This is a data point I’d approach with a lot of caution, but it’s worth noting that the Edison Research exit poll of Georgia, which has been recalibrated to match the actual results in the state, found that a tiny 49-48 plurality of Georgia voters preferred Democratic control of Congress in the November electorate.
Nate Silver Twitter Electoral College
And in the special election, there’s also the question of what voters who voted for candidates other than Warnock or Loeffler — more than 40 percent of the electorate — will do. One risk for Loeffler is that her positioning herself to the extreme right in the November election will turn some of them off. Although Collins has a conservative voting record in Congress, his voters were actually somewhat more moderate than Loeffler’s in November. If a handful of them drift over to Warnock, that could be a problem for Loeffler — likewise, if some of them simply sit out the runoff. Loeffler’s ideological positioning for the runoff has been more opaque than for the November election, but she’s still been bragging about her 100 percent Trump voting record and — along with Perdue — signed a letter calling on Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign as the state’s results were being finalized.
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Meanwhile, Warnock made it through the November election relatively unscathed, since he had emerged as the clear Democratic front-runner by mid-September while Loeffler and Collins were training their fire on one another. He has since, though, been subject to a series of attacks about past comments he made as a preacher and a domestic dispute with his ex-wife. In other words, Warnock is not likely to maintain the strong favorability ratings he had in November when he wasn’t subject to as much incoming fire. On the other side of the coin, though, both Perdue and Loeffler have been subject to renewed scrutiny about stock trades they made while in office, although it’s not clear how much new information has been revealed since November.
For what it’s worth, this is one of those times when I changed my mind over the course of writing an article. I assumed I’d come out of it saying something like, “Sure, polls show a toss-up and it’s anybody’s race, but we all know that the Republicans are slight favorites.”
As RealClearPolitics’s Sean Trende wrote last month, however, I’m not really so sure there’s a solid basis for that conclusion. This is a fairly sui generis election and it’s not clear what “fundamentals” would apply, especially in a period where Trump is a lame duck but not at all acting like one, and his approval ratings are actually worse than they were on Nov. 3. Nor is this the strongest batch of candidates; three of the four candidates (all but Perdue) have never won an election before.
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And Perdue has won only one election — for his current term in the Senate — by an underwhelming single-digit margin in a very Republican year in 2014.
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Nate Silver Twitter Rant
If you default to the November results, those would imply that Perdue is the slight favorite, but I don’t think that’s true of Loeffler.
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That doesn’t mean I think the Democrats are favored, either. But the polls show these races are as close to a toss-up as you can get, and at FiveThirtyEight we’d generally need a good reason to buck the polls. While the question of whether polls have a built-in bias against Republicans — or for that matter, whether they have a short-term bias that applies during COVID-19 — is something we’ll need to sort out before the 2022 midterms, the polls were fairly accurate in Georgia in November and the pollsters who have ventured in to poll the runoffs are a fairly Republican-leaning group. In fact, the race is close enough that the possibility of a split verdict — most likely with Perdue winning but not Loeffler — may be higher than most people assume.
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