When an underwhelming primary rival to Brian Kemp announced his candidacy I took a look at the Georgia governor’s comeback strategy and wrote it up at New York.
Until March 25, Georgia governor Brian Kemp was looking pretty finished politically. Very publicly and vociferously blamed by Donald Trump for ratifying Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s certification of Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia on November 20, Kemp was persona non grata in MAGA country. He had already been periodically in Trump’s doghouse over his handling of the pandemic in his state, and before that, over his rejection of the Boss’s instruction that he appoint Representative Doug Collins to an open U.S. Senate seat. But getting in the way of the 45th president’s attempted election coup was the final straw: Trump has been publicly and privately vowing to take down Kemp in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary, as recently as the RNC donor retreat in Florida last weekend. During his brief campaign appearance in Georgia before the January Senate runoffs that ended in defeat for his party, Trump even called on Collins to challenge Kemp in 2022, which wasn’t exactly a Georgia GOP talking point. Nor was Trump’s later suggestion that Kemp should resign.
Kemp managed to keep his mouth shut in the face of all these provocations, grimly promising to support Trump in 2024 and generally taking his medicine. But his comeback strategy became apparent when he made a big show of signing Georgia’s highly controversial new election law on March 25. It’s unclear whether he deliberately courted the appearance of racist impropriety, though he did sign the bill under a painting of a plantation and barred a Black Democratic legislator from his office during his remarks on the bill. (State Representative Park Cannon was subsequently manhandled by state troopers who wrestled her out of the Georgia Capitol to be arrested on multiple felony counts.)
As anger over the legislation mounted (echoing the anger over
Kemp’s own voter-suppression measures as Georgia’s secretary of State, the job he insisted on keeping during his narrowly successful 2018 gubernatorial campaign) and major corporations joined the criticism of the law, Kemp was able to adopt a pose that is legal tender for a GOP pol at present: victim of “race card” politics backed by “woke” corporations. As the Associated Press
reported, it was very clear to Georgia Republicans what the man who had
labeled himself a “politically incorrect conservative” in 2018 was up to:
“[T]he sweeping
election law could be one of Kemp’s last hopes to rekindle a bond with Republicans who remain fiercely loyal to Trump and will be a critical force in next year’s GOP primary. The legislation, which Kemp signed into law, could give him an opening to persuade Republicans that he is an outsider, willing to stand up to Democrats, corporate leaders, and sports leagues who have derided the measure as an affront to democracy that is based on false claims and needs to be rewritten.
“’This is an absolute godsend for Brian Kemp,’ said Brian Robinson, a Republican consultant and former top aide to Kemp’s predecessor, Nathan Deal.”
Kemp has eagerly been making the rounds of conservative media outlets to defend the new law, struggling, no doubt, to hide his glee at the liberal criticism it has attracted. The furor is helping him back home where it matters as well, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein observes:
“In recent weeks, Kemp has been a mainstay on conservative cable TV shows and enjoyed raucous receptions at grassroots meetings across the state, seemingly dissuading better-known Republican rivals such as former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, whom Trump once recruited to run.”
Morning Consult reports that Kemp’s job-approval rating among Georgia Republicans rose from 59 percent in mid-March to 74 percent in early April. Nonetheless, a well-known Georgia pol close to Trump has now announced a 2022 primary bid against the governor. But his identity could be a blessing in disguise to the incumbent.
Vernon Jones is a Black former state legislator and county CEO who endorsed Trump’s reelection last year and has more recently switched parties. He got a lot of MAGA attention, particularly after his featured role at the GOP National Convention. He has really taken to his new career in Republican politics, speaking at the notorious January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and basking in the affection of the Big Man (“When are you announcing? When are you announcing?” Trump said to Jones at Mar-a-Lago last week).
Jones’s announcement made it clear that he’s the former president’s surrogate.
Jones, however, is a risky proposition as Trump’s instrument of vengeance against Kemp. Aside from the fact that he’s a career Democratic politician from a jurisdiction (the Atlanta inner suburb of Dekalb County) that your average rural Republican wouldn’t visit on a bet, he has always had some issues, as Bluestein explains, calling him “a uniquely polarizing figure in state politics”:
“Jones launched his political career in the early 1990s in the Georgia House before winning the first of two terms as DeKalb County’s chief executive officer in 2000. His stint was marked by controversy …
“[H]is angry outbursts and clashes with other local officials dominated headlines, as did more serious allegations …
“[A] wide-ranging special grand jury report released in 2013, after Jones left office, recommended an investigation against Jones and other DeKalb officials into possible bid-rigging and theft when he was chief executive, painting a picture of a culture of corruption that spanned from his office to workers and contractors in the watershed department.”
Worse yet, Jones was accused of rape in 2005. His successful defense was that the intercourse in question was part of a consensual three-way sexual encounter. This is still not a great look for candidates in the Christian-right- dominated Georgia GOP. And speaking of the Christian right, Jones had a problem with a vote in the legislature against a “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban Kemp had championed in 2019. On the eve of his candidacy, Jones executed a straight-out flip-flop on abortion, stating he now believed zygotes should be protected “from the moment of conception.”
You get the sense that Jones will serve as an irritant to Kemp but not a serious threat unless Trump himself forcefully intervenes in the race (and/or if a more formidable Trump-backed candidate, like Collins, who is reportedly mulling a Senate race, jumps in). And even then, Georgia Republicans will remember that Trump had strongly endorsed Kemp during the last gubernatorial primary. MAGA bravos looking for a pound of flesh may instead focus on Raffensperger, who has drawn an actual member of Congress as his 2022 primary opponent, along with the rival he barely defeated in 2018.
If Kemp does escape, he will likely face a rematch with his nemesis, voting-rights activist Stacey Abrams. And in that contest, all the treasure he has stored up in Republican circles by boasting of his commitment to “election integrity” may earn him a backlash from the voters he and his party have sought to bedevil.
Coldeye can write for himself. But I took him to mean that 89% of registered Reps voted vs. 81% of the registered Dems voted in the election he was referring to. Someone please correct me if I’ve got it wrong, but that seems totally consistent with there being 4% more self-identified Dems than Reps among those who voted.
An example, using made up numbers, to show how this can be so:
Out of 1000 people who vote in our hypothetical election:
390 self-identify as Dem
350 self-identify as Rep
Turnout among registered Democrats is (rounding the numbers):
81% x 481 registered Dems = 390 self-identified Dems voting
89% x 393 registered Reps = 350 self-identified Reps voting
It is again not true that there were a higher percentage of republicans in last election. In fact in 1996 and 2000 the break down was 39% democrat, 35% republican, and 26% independent. That is what the zogby poll uses when he is weighing his daily poling.
“Hey, I’m with Kerry but it is true that historically, Republicans turn out in greater PERCENTAGES (read my prior post) than Democrats. Thus it may be appropriate to weight according to 89% R vs 81% D turnout.”
Um, but if you do this while assuming a 50-50 split between the parties, wouldn’t you get a strong over-representation of Republican voting intentions? Wouldn’t you almost *have* to weight by party ID first?
coldeye:
saying something several times does not make it true. if you have some historical analysis to make that is counter to what is CW of both what I know from my own research, and what I have seen by reading other posts and on other political sites, please provide your sources. thx.
Hey, I’m with Kerry but it is true that historically, Republicans turn out in greater PERCENTAGES (read my prior post) than Democrats. Thus it may be appropriate to weight according to 89% R vs 81% D turnout. I agree that in absolute numbers, more Democrats turned out last time. But given a group of Republicans and a same sized group of Democrats, history says more of the Republicans will vote.
Could someone please explain to me why pollsters continue to assume Bush voters are more likely to turn out??? I live in a conservative Republican area and even here that is just obviously not true. Many Bush voters here are not that enthusiastic, while Kerry voters are fired up, even the ones who don’t like Kerry that much are determined to vote against Bush. And Dem volunteers have come out to every residence in my area getting out the vote, but I have never even seen a Republican volunteer.
I obtained the Gallup internals tonight and have them posted over at my blog.
We will not know whether Bush is really ahead by 8 until state polls show up. Right now, only Rasmussen tracks the state polls and they essentially show a tie. State polls have been scarce in recent days although a Research 2000 poll shows Kerry ahead by 4 in NH as of saturday October 16.
I really think volatility is in play for polling….
It can drive you crazy to sit that close to day to day poll numbers. I think the key is to just keep pushing GOTV efforts and doing voter education.
Emphasize Kerry’s strengths and that he at least has a vision of how to extricate us from an increasingly unpopular war.
It is not true that there was more republican turn out than democratic in 2000 election. In fact according to moveon.org and other groups there was actually higher democratic turn out. Also those likely voter results in the polls are very suspect since it is based on whether you have voted in 2000 election. In fact there has been a huge voter registration drive particularly for democrats. Who really knows what will happen in this election.
Weirdly, there is a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) note up on yahoo news, only 90 minutes old at this posting, that the Washington Post finds Kerry leading by 10% in a dozen swing states. I don’t see anything about it on the WP site, but maybe the Washington Post will discover its own poll results from the CBC and post them later.
There is a dimension to this that I know, having had statistics, but that I still can’t “get into my thick head” in terms of having a dispassionate view of these poll results. I want Kerry to show a solid lead.
But suppose the electorate is divided 50-50, or for that matter, you have a jar with 1/2 white balls and 1/2 black balls, 50 million of each, all mixed up. As you sample groups of five or six hundred, you will get one sample “leaning black” and another sample “leaning white.” The more you sample the more the sum of all the samples will resemble a normal distribution.
In other words, it’s only a matter of time, if you keep doing all these voting samples, before one “random survey” yields 90% of the country for Bush and another yields 90% for Kerry, with no underlying change in the voter preference. That would be something like a 1,000 chance of occuring, and we see three polls a week for 12 weeks (only 36 polls) we are not likely to see it at all–in fact the polling organization would probably suppress such a skewed result and try again. But in fact such an occurence (90% one way or the other) would become a certainty with enough polls. And this 1/1000 or “z3” event aside, it is a much greater probability that we will see Bush or Kerry up or down by 5% as time goes on. That’s within the limits of the methodology.
Variance of this kind also applies to reported party membership and such.
Although this purely statistical measurement effect is supposedly captured in the +/- figure given by each poll, that figure does not capture the “normal distribution of polling results” which will occur with repeated polls. And this latter distribution figure would INCLUDE the sum of all error measurements as carefully discussed by this site’s host and commentator. (This is an unpleasant truth of the social sciences too. If you get 2,000 political scientists testing variable significance for arcane theories, at least 5% of the variables will be found significant–and make a career, purely by chance: every now and then someone who bets on a single number at roulette wheel wins, ya know).
In sum, the polls aren’t telling us anything other than that their measurement accuracy is not sufficient to gauge the underlying distribution of real votes, which by the way, will also be skewed by voter suppression effects–in other words the actual election will not represent voter preference. It will simply be the largest sample, but maybe not even the best one.
Well I’m reading that the billionaires are pushing more money into the Party of Mordor so I guess I’ll go donate again to the DNC (my way of making sure some money goes to Senate and House candidates). I sure hope there are 2 or 3 million other people like me out there. I need the company to get my $50 and $100 contributions to matter.
Coldeye:
I was under the impression from several of these polling sites, and from what I can remember from my studies in this area, that actuallly historically the number of Democrats has been higher than Republicans. Hence, the arguments back and forth about party ID. Also, it really is telling to see the results from 2000 in terms of the polling for Gore and Bush. Finally, I firmly believe that likely voter models are a waste of time. Stats are an inexact science as it is. Adding this extra layer of guess work to it in my mind increases the chances that the final numbers are wrong- now it could be wrong in our favor, or against us- so I am not saying this as a partisan, but as someone who wonders how valuable it is to create a few extra degrees of modeling that is trying to guess at where voters will be on Nov 2, 2004 v. where they were in a different historical context of Nov 2000 or Nov 1996. For me, it depends too much on trying to use stats to understand human psychology- this has often been the error of the social sciences anyway- to treat a very soft science as though it were studying Genetics or Physics where these mathamatical models would have greater predicative value because the variables would be more definable. I wish people had a greater understanding of the limitations of using stats in a social science setting v. hard science setting b/c I believe this is a central issue regardless of all the stuff with cell phones, etc that people bring up and explains why so many of these polls were wrong 4 years ago. I forget the exact number, but aren’t these models suppose to have a 97 percent or something like that confidence value that the outcome will not change from one group to another- well we are dealing with people here- it simply isnt that simple and certainly not that simple when you add in a lot of additional complicating questions trying to determine the likihood of human behavior.
So frustrating. It’s like people have no memory. They see Kerry debate Bush, they say Kerry won the debate handily, but two days later they swing back to Bush.
Why won’t people wake up?
I follow your blog regularly and when I saw the Gallup Poll for today I knew it was bogus. This race is tied at a minimum. But, I suspect Kerry is way ahead.
what are the internals on this poll
Yes, but the real question is WHAT IS THE BREAKDOWN in the new Gallup poll. Does that three point RV lead mean that Bush is ahead by three, or is the result skewed one way or the other by the sampling? ALSO, did you notice no RV totals on WAPO today. Just a disturbing widening 50-46 in you-know-who’s favor.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic – Democratic turnout is historically lower, on a percentage basis, than Republican turnout.