I’ll try to move on to other topics directly, but wanted to do one more post about politics in my home state of Georgia. There was good news and bad news today for embattled incumbent Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was surprisingly forced into an August 8 runoff by Dekalb County Commissioner Hank Johnson. The good news was her endorsement by Andrew Young, who remains a Georgia icon, and who cited a national police union contribution to Johnson (presumably motivated by her recent run-in with a Capitol Hill cop) as angering him into supporting McKinney. The bad news was a post-primary poll from Insider Advantage showing Johnson leading McKinney among likely runoff voters by a 46-21 margin.Figuring out who’s actually going to vote in this kind of runoff is obviously very tricky, so the IA poll should be taken with several grains of salt. But you have to wonder how much room for growth in support the highly polarizing incumbent really has. Aside from her national notoriety, she’s been in Congress for twelve of the last fourteen years, most of it representing pretty much the same district.On another front, I received an email from a Georgia observer who suggested the rumor I repeated earlier this week–about Johnson raising a ton of dough, especially from Jewish Democrats–is actually disinformation being circulated by the McKinney camp in an effort to fire up her base and to depict Johnson as a puppet of shadowy outside forces (not a new tactic for her, based on past races). I have no idea who’s right about this; we’ll have to see whether Johnson suddenly starts appearing on Atlanta metro television screens.The 4th congressional district runoff could have a big effect as well on two statewide Democratic runoffs, since turnout every where else is likely to be infinitesimal. In the contest to succeed Secretary of State Cathy Cox (who lost her gubernatorial race to Mark Taylor), the likelihood of a relatively high turnout in the majority-black 4th is giving new hope to second-place finisher Darryl Hicks, who is African-American, against Gail Buckner, who is white.In the other statewide runoff, for Lt. Gov., former state Rep. Jim Martin (who edged former state sen. Greg Hecht 42-38 in the primary) is running radio ads touting his endorsement by Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, who is very popular among Democrats of all races. You have to feel a bit sorry for Martin and Hecht; they were able to draw a lot of attention and money on the theory that they would be facing Ralph Reed in a race that would have overshadowed everything else in Georgia politics. Running against Casey Cagle is a whole ‘nother thing, though Cagle’s own right-wing record, and perhaps residual anger over the harsh ads he ran against Reed, could provide some traction for a Democrat. More immediately, you wonder if either Martin or Hecht held some money back for the runoff. If not, Georgians may soon see them selling boiled peanuts on the side of the road to raise enough moolah for that last-minute runoff push.In non-runoff Georgia political news, DKos reports that a new poll for Republican candidate (and former Rep.) Max Burns shows him trailing Democratic incumbent John Barrow by one percentage point (44-43) in the always-tight 12th congressional district which runs from Augusta to Savannah. The district was originally drawn to favor Democrats, but Burns was able to beat ethically challenged Champ Walker in 2002; he then lost to Barrow 52-48 in 2004. The notorious Georgia re-redistricting of 2005 didn’t reduce the Democratic advantage in the 12th, but it did remove Barrow’s home town of Athens, which means he’s having to solidify name ID elsewhere.Barrow’s race is of national import because he is one of just a handful of incumbent Democratic House members considered vulnerable this November. Another is also from Georgia: 3d district Rep. Jim Marshall. After easily dispatching a heavily financed Republican in 2004, Marshall had to deal with a new map that significantly boosted the Republican vote. He also drew a serious challenger in former Rep. Mac Collins, who lost a Senate primary in 2004. But Marshall has had good leads in all the public polling, and like Barrow, is narrowly favored going into the general election.All in all, the politics in my home state will be as hot and sticky as the weather over the next couple of months.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 10: Nope, Republicans Can’t Rerun 2024 in 2026
Hard as it can be to define the best strategies for one’s party, it’s also imporant–and fun–to mock the other party’s strategic thinking. I had a chance to do that this week at New York:
Hanging over all the audacious steps taken so far this year by Donald Trump and his Republican Party has been the fact that voters will get a chance to respond in 2026. The midterm elections could deny the GOP its governing trifecta and thus many of its tools for imposing Trump’s will on the country. Indeed, one reason congressional Republicans ultimately united around Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was the sense that they needed to get all the policy victories they could in one fell swoop before the tough uphill slog to a likely midterm defeat began. No one had to be reminded that midterm House losses by the president’s party are a rule with rare exceptions. With Republicans holding a bare two-seat majority (temporarily three due to vacancies created by deaths), the gavel of Speaker Mike Johnson must feel mighty slippery in his hands.
But if only to keep their own spirits high, and to encourage fundraising, Republican voices have been talking about how they might pull off a midterm miracle and hang on to the trifecta. A particularly high-profile example is from former RNC political director Curt Anderson, writing at the Washington Post. Anderson notes the unhappy precedents and professes to have a new idea in order to “defy history.” First, however, he builds a big straw man:
“[I]t’s always the same story. And the same conventional campaign wisdom prevails: Every candidate in the president’s party is encouraged by Washington pundits and campaign consultants to run away from the national narrative. They are urged to follow instead House Speaker Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill Jr.’s famous axiom that ‘all politics is local’ and to think small and focus on homegrown issues.”
Actually, nobody who was really paying attention has said that since ol’ Tip’s retirement and death. As Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institution has explained, presidential and congressional electoral trends made a decisive turn toward convergence in 1994, mostly because the ideological sorting out of both parties was beginning to reduce reasons for ticket splitting. And so, returning to a pattern that was also common in the 19th century, 21st-century congressional elections typically follow national trends even in midterms with no presidential candidates offering “coattails.” So in making the following prescription, Anderson is pushing on a wide-open door:
“[T]o maintain or build on its current narrow margin in the House, the Republican Party will have to defy historical gravity.
“The way to do that is not to shun Trump and concentrate on bills passed and pork delivered to the locals, but to think counterintuitively. Republicans should nationalize the midterms and run as if they were a general election in a presidential year. They should run it back, attempting to make 2026 a repeat of 2024, with high turnout.”
Aside from the fact that they have no choice but to do exactly that (until the day he leaves the White House and perhaps beyond, no one and nothing will define the GOP other than Donald Trump), there are some significant obstacles to “rerunning” 2024 in 2026.
There’s a lazy tendency to treat variations in presidential and midterm turnout as attributable to the strength or weakness of presidential candidates. Thus we often hear that a sizable number of MAGA folk “won’t bother” to vote if their hero isn’t on the ballot. Truth is, there is always a falloff in midterm turnout, and it isn’t small. The 2018 midterms (during Trump’s first term) saw the highest turnout percentages (50.1 percent) since 1914. But that was still far below the 60.1 percent of eligible voters who turned out in 2016, much less the 66.4 percent who voted in 2020. Reminding voters of the identity of the president’s name and party ID isn’t necessary and won’t make much difference.
What Anderson seems focused on is the fact that in 2024, for the first time in living memory, it was the Republican ticket that benefited from participation by marginal voters. So it’s understandable he thinks the higher the turnout, the better the odds for the GOP in 2026; that may even be true, though a single election does not constitute a long-term trend, and there’s some evidence Trump is losing support from these same low-propensity voters at a pretty good clip. At any rate, the message Anderson urges on Republicans puts a good spin on a dubious proposition:
“The GOP should define the 2026 campaign as a great national battle between Trump’s bright America First future and its continuing promise of secure borders and prosperity, versus the left-wing radicalism — open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests and biological men competing in women’s sports — that Democrats still champion. Make it a referendum on the perceived new leaders of the Democratic Party, such as far-left Reps. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York).”
Without admitting it, Anderson points to the single biggest problem for Republicans: They don’t have a Democratic incumbent president or a Democratic Congress to run against. Jasmine Crockett is not, in fact, running in Pennsylvania, where she is likely unknown, and even AOC is a distant figure in Arizona. Democrats aren’t going to be running on “open borders and cancel culture or pro-Hamas protests or biological men competing in women’s sports” at all. And Republicans aren’t going to be running on “Trump’s bright America First future” either; they’ll be running on the currently unpopular Trump megabill and on economic and global conditions as they exist in 2026. Democrats could benefit from a final surge of Trump fatigue in the electorate and will almost certainly do well with wrong-track voters (including the notoriously unhappy Gen-Z cohort) who will oppose any incumbent party.
Whatever happens, it won’t be a 2024 rerun, and the best bet is that the precedents will bear out and Republicans will lose the House. A relatively small group of competitive races may hold down Democratic gains a bit, but unless an unlikely massive wave of prosperity breaks out, Hakeem Jeffries is your next Speaker and Republicans can worry about what they’ll do when Trump is gone for good.