Thread by @rudnicknoah

Late night thread looking at Stacey Abram's race and the role of African American voters, especially a sneaking suspicion about rural AA voters not coming out in force for her, complete with maps and charts! 1/whenever I die on this hill

First off, I'm looking at the basic maps of the margin and turnout change from the 2014 to the 2018 GA gubernatorial elections (blue is Dems, red is GOP), you can see the hard left pivot around Atlanta and the rural white turnout surge in the North and SE

I also looked at AA population by county according to the census and broke it up like this. The muted colors have an AA population of 25-50%, while the dark blue and green are majority black. Red is under 25% AA and blue and green separate out Atlanta from the rest of the state

First off we'll divide on this category by turnout change from 2014, the higher it is, the more the relative turnout jumped. Circle size denotes the number of votes in 2018

It's clear here that whites turned out in force as AA votes struggled but interesting to note that while rural black counties fell behind and sort on size, majority AA counties did have have close to an equivalent turnout bump at only a 40% median growth

Now for the more interesting median shift, herewith positive being more of a shift to Republicans and negative being a shift towards Democrats

Here the size of the county in each cohort was the big divider, Dems won better margins in large counties while bleeding hard in smaller ones. What's reallllly interesting to point out is how similar in margin change the rural black belt with 25-50% AA and the under 25% AA look

Stacey Abram's did great in more metro areas and was able to make convincing swings in the mixed suburban Atlanta suburbs but there is a clear turnout and marginal overperformance over rural areas regardless of racial composition, which is a pretty cool breakdown

cc @leahaskarinam for asking and giving me the idea for this breakdown rather than back of the napkin math on county topline shifts

Why she fell flat here is up for debate. Maybe she was too liberal or promised too much, maybe Medicaid expansion which VA showed plays well in rural\ areas wasn't as salient in 2018. Kemp'soperation was seriously impressive, but the margin shifts shows Abrams came up short too

Also just the rurals all around saw large growth that I wonder if that continues to spill over into 2020, interesting to watch for targeting in these states and which ones can be swamped by high rural turnout like GA and which can't be like NV last cycle

And all the sheets and data are here on 5 interactive tabs to play around with if you'd like and see which county falls where: public.tableau.com/profile/noah77…

*The y-axis should say margin change, sorry about that

Just added the actual names of the counties, may be useful