I've never seen a pollster go so far out of their way as SurveyUSA has gone in their disclaimers. Best bites below:
"Results need to be digested with caution and placed into the proper context, which is that no pollster can solve an equation in which every input is a variable and none of the inputs are constants. That said, as best we make it out at this hour:"
"[Ossoff's] lead is within the survey's wiggle room and should not be viewed as anything more than validation that every vote will be critical when on 01/05/2021 Georgia starts counting ballots."
"SurveyUSA urges consumers of this research to reflect on how unfamiliar the footing is for anyone attempting to measure what is happening in Georgia as Bulldogs hang Christmas lights during a Pandemic and the Republican President is at war with the Republican Governor..."
"Just 16% of GA Republican runoff voters believe their runoff vote will be counted accurately. By contrast: 52% of Democrats believe their runoff vote will be counted accurately. How this affects turnout is unknowable."
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Reading through this @J_Insider interview with Congressman-elect Madison "Face of the new GOP generation" Cawthorn and it looks like Tommy Tuberville isn't the only one who needs history lessons.
"Jesus is kind of a good guy" is 99.9% something that an uninterested Jewish person told Madison Cawthorn to get him to stop trying to convert them.
Perhaps Cawthorn's attempts to commune with his district's Jewish community have been unsuccessful not because services are online, but because he keeps on trying to convert them!
The thing is, it’s most futile to try and figure out why any individual member lost and what specific messaging dragged them down when the presidential is what it is. FL-26 went from Clinton +16 to Trump +6. That’s why DMP lost, not because of any ads Giménez or the GOP ran.
So the pertinent question, at least for this race (and FL-27, though that race has its own quirks) isn’t why did DMP lose, it’s why did Democratic support collapse in South Florida?
South Florida is pretty unique — we can’t generalize what happened there to explain Democrats’ losses nationwide. But to say that DMP is wrong about what cost her the seat because of a few tv ads run against her and not take into account the overall environment is a mistake.
It's ancient history but the original impetus for appointing Kelly Loeffler, outsider Atlanta businesswoman & WNBA team owner, was because she could appeal to the increasingly moderate Georgia electorate better than the too-Trumpy Doug Collins.
Loeffler and Perdue are clearly trying to thread a needle. With Trump making baseless claims of election fraud the central GOP message, they can't distance without alienating the voters they need either. But they also run risk of depressing turnout. It's a tough spot to be in.
A brief thread on Georgia runoff elections -- may have something much longer on all this in next issue but wanted to get some thoughts down (thread 1/x):
Georgia is the only state where general elections for federal office are subject to an absolute majority requirement.
If no candidate receives 50%+1 votes, the top-two vote getters advance to a January 5 runoff. This year, there will be at least one Senate runoff in Georgia, in the special election to replace Sen. Isakson. Democrat Raphael Warnock won 33% of the vote, Sen. Loeffler 26%.
There may also be a runoff in the regular US Senate election, where Sen. David Perdue is in danger of falling below 50% and being forced into a runoff with Democrat Jon Ossoff.
The two elections would happen simultaneously.
This system has been in place since the mid-1960s.
Signing off until I absolutely have to be back on this evening, but wanted to take a moment to shout out a few folks who've been indispensible the past few months (thread 1/x):
Now here's an ad for you: Sen. Kelly Loeffler's new spot is all about how she's "more conservative than Attila the Hun," and includes an actor portraying a grunting Attila who delivers orders to, among other things, "eliminate the liberal scribes."
Again, this is the senator whose initial appointment last year was greeted with much punditry about how she'd appeal to moderate women in the Atlanta suburbs who were drifting away from the GOP and turning Georgia purple.
Now she's comparing herself favorably to Attila the Hun.
It underscores what a missed opportunity the special election could be for Democrats. Collins and Loeffler are both running so far to the right, there's a whole swath of potential voters in the middle up for grabs. If Stacey Abrams had run and cleared the Democratic field...