How Georgia turned blue: Huge gains in the Atlanta suburbs make up for a decline in the Black share of the electorate nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Georgia is the first state where we have fully updated vote history data, and it shows the Black share of the electorate falling to its lowest level since 2006
Biden compensated with huge gains in affluent and well-educated precincts
As a result, Biden's gains were concentrated in a ring around Atlanta
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One election looms over the Georgia runoff: the 2008 runoff, when the GOP won a runoff election by 15 points after leading by just 3 points on Election Day.
I really don't think this should, well, loom over our analysis
For starters, some of the mythologizing about the 2008 runoff is wrong. Many analysts have blamed a precipitous decline in black turnout, but I don't think that's what happened
By my estimate (since for whatever reason the GA SOS didn't publish it, as they usually do), the Black share of the electorate in the GA special was 27.7 percent Black--it was down a bit from the general (29.9 IIRC), but still quite healthy (and indeed, higher than 2020!)
As an initial definitional question, we do have to define what we're calling the 'suburbs' here--and for simplicity I'm basically going to include the whole Democratic-trending part of the Atlanta area, including all of DeKalb and Fulton Counties--even though it includes Atlanta
There are plenty of suburbs in DeKalb and Fulton, and Biden made huge gains there. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to exclude Atlanta-proper from the historical data. But we can go back at the end and take out DeKalb and Fulton and see if it's a different story
Let's take a look at the turnout data so far in North Carolina, where counties worth one-third of the electorate have now updated their vote history data
These counties lean a little bit left, with a disproportionate chunk of the white liberal vote (Wake, Buncombe, Durham all in). So I think these numbers could be rosier than the final tallies for Democrats statewide, but I think the patterns will largely hold up
Let's start with party registration.
In these counties, 77% of Democrats turned out v. 82% of GOP. That's a 7 pt increase over 2016 in both cases.
As a result, the electorate by party reg in these counties is D+5.8, v. D+7.4 among all registered voters.
A few people have asked about some other demographic groups in Georgia, namely young and other nonwhite groups. For some arcane reasons, it's a little more complicated to think about those groups--but let's go into it
The age problem is induced on our end: we do not have the final Georgia SOS voter file from before the election (though we've had a request in).
This doesn't make a material difference on race, based on public state figures. It might on age, given that late registrants are young
If we did go down the road of analyzing age, based on this data, I'm fairly confident it would be at least a little biased against youth turnout, and potentially meaningfully for the way the story is written. So we're just going to wait and see on that one
A few random thoughts this morning on what Democrats should take from the election results, as the recriminations and so on begin
1) Democrats shouldn't blame themselves for *quite* so much!
This election was about Trump. He was the incumbent. It was a referendum on him, and everyone knew it. If the GOP did better, it's mainly because Trump was stronger than understood--not simply because Dems blew it
Or put differently: I'm not really sure there was much Democrats could do about what happened here. Trump completely dominated American life for the last four years, people knew what they thought of it, and it's hard to believe there were magic words to undo it
I think that's still a pretty good guess, though getting from Biden +75/80k to 100k depends on two kinds of hazy votes that may be worse (or better) for Biden than I've roughly penciled-in: the 10k late absentees and provisional ballots
Right now, Biden's up ~60k and there are another ~40k regular absentees. So getting into the 75-80k range before provisionals/post-election absentees is straightforward, even if we conservatively assume that a disproportionate share of remaining absentees will be rejected
From there, we've got
--10k late absentees--which I'd expect to be good (say 2-1) but maybe not amazing for Biden, since Dems disproportionately returned their ballots early.
-- ~70k uncounted provisionals, very disproportionately in Dem areas