Lessons From Georgia (and, Equally Important, South Carolina)
Maybe now Democrats can start pursuing a strategy likely to actually win and finally bury the fanciful notion that Republican voters will abandon the monster in the White House. If tonight’s GA-06 special election proves anything, it’s that no amount of paid advertising and no amount of evidence of obstruction of justice (if not outright treason) will pry loose Republican voters. Fortunately, buried beneath the headlines is the empirical evidence that Democrats can take back the House in 2018 if they focus all their resources on mobilizing Democratic voters instead of trying to woo Republicans.
Democrats spent nearly $30 million in the GA-06 race, making it the most expensive House of Representatives contest in U.S. History. And they still lost. As the election approached, Jon Ossoff’s campaign increasingly moved to the middle in a vain attempt to attract Republican support in the hopes moderate Republicans would be appalled by Trump’s behavior. This was the same approach tried by the Clinton campaign which focused on his temperament instead of his racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Both times, the approach failed.
What’s that saying? When people show you who they are, believe them. For whatever reason — racial solidarity, cultural anxiety, willing suspension of disbelief, or something else — so-called moderate Republicans are sticking with their man in the White House.
Fortunately, we don’t need to win the votes of Republicans, and the results from Georgia — and the much-less heralded special election in South Carolina tonight — actually affirm the promising prospects for Democrats to take back the House in 2018. In a nutshell, midterm elections always see significant drop-off in voter turnout, and the party that minimizes that drop-off usually wins control of the chamber (I wrote about this here in a recent column in The Nation).
For all the hoopla about the GA-06 race (hoopla which, by the way, contributed to the Ossoff defeat by highlighting the significance of the race and driving up Republican turnout), the more telling numbers can be found in South Carolina. In that election, also tonight, Republican Ralph Norman won by a mere 2,836 votes in a seat the Republicans won by 56,000 votes last November. More important, the winner in South Carolina got just 44,000 votes, but there are 132,000 eligible Black voters in that district. The Democrats could have picked up that seat without getting a single white vote, had they invested in, communicated with, organized, and inspired the African American electorate. The Republican drop-off in the South Carolina race was 72%. Democrats, meanwhile, had higher turnout, with a drop-off of just 60%, making the margin razor thin.
Even in the GA-06 race — which really is an outlier with little predictive value given the extraordinary attention and resources showered on it — Republican turnout was down more than that of the Democrats. Republican turnout fell 37% while Democratic turnout dropped just 8%.
If the turnout patterns shown tonight replicate themselves — and they are likely to as every special election this year has seen much better Democratic performance than Republican, Democrats can take back the House next year by getting 84% of those who voted in 2016 to come back out in 2018. But to do so will require getting it through the thick skulls of Democratic consultants that we are not going to change the minds of Republican voters. The Democratic ecosystem will spend more than $750 million between now and November 2018, and all of that money should go to organizing, inspiring, and mobilizing core Democratic voters. That is the way to win. If tonight’s results proved nothing else, it’s that every dollar spent wooing Republicans is money flushed down the drain.
For all the data nerds out there, here are the numbers that contain the silver lining. As I outlined in The Nation article, if Republican drop-off is 36%, Democrats can win the House. Even in GA-06, the drop-off was still 37% (but Ossoff needed to actually slightly increase Dem votes, which he didn’t. Not so in the other districts needed to win back the House).
