Georgia offers first test of both parties’ post-Trump future

Republicans and Democrats will both get their first glimpse of the new political era on Tuesday.

Just two months after a historic presidential election that saw record turnout, the two parties are squaring off again in the battleground state of Georgia over a pair of closely watched Senate runoff races.

At stake is majority control of the U.S. Senate, which would shift to Democrats if they sweep both races. But in the first federal election since President Donald Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, it’s also the initial test of whether either party can maintain or even grow the remarkable levels of support they received from voters in November.

For Republican candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, that would mean matching Trump’s massive turnout surge among white working class voters in rural parts of the state. For Democratic candidates Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, that means replicating Biden’s seismic increase in support among college-educated voters concentrated in the suburbs.

Political operatives say the implications of both results extend well beyond Georgia.

“This will be the first election of significance since November,” said Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster. “So are Democrats going to carry the same amount of support that Biden did in the suburbs of Atlanta, or is it going to slip a few points? And will rural America turn out at the same rate for other Republicans as it has for Donald Trump?”

At the heart of both challenges is navigating an uncertain future after Trump leaves office, following a tumultuous four years of politics in which the president reshaped each party’s voter base of support.

Those shifts culminated in November, when Trump benefited from a massive and largely unexpected turnout surge among voters who live far from major cities and other urban centers.

But that increase wasn’t enough to offset Biden’s gains in mostly suburban areas, where Democrats made significant gains over the duration of Trump’s presidency with many of those voters repelled by the Republican leader’s persona and perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

There were few better examples of that dynamic than in Georgia, which Trump lost narrowly after winning there by five percentage points in 2016. The president did better in many rural areas in 2020: In Jasper County, located between Atlanta and Macon, he won more than 25% more votes than he did four year prior, while Biden saw only marginal gains over Hillary Clinton’s total.

But in Gwinnett County in suburban Atlanta, Biden defeated Trump by 18 percentage points, tripling Clinton’s six-point edge in the county four years earlier.

The trend of Democrats becoming more white collar while the GOP becomes more blue collar has been ongoing for decades. But Trump’s presidency, political operatives say, accelerated the change.

“There’s been a realignment going on for a long time, and frankly Donald Trump sped that up,” said Tyler Law, a Democratic strategist. “He moved that along.”

Strategists caution that although Georgia offers the first major test of whether the parties can retain their grip on their newfound supporters, its results will still come with caveats.

Trump, for one, has yet to leave office, and is waging an unprecedented effort to contest the results of the election while making baseless accusations of fraud about November’s outcome. He has feuded with Georgia Republican leaders who have declined to overturn the election’s results, even demanding last week the resignation of the state’s GOP governor, Brian Kemp.

Special elections themselves are often imperfect indications of the broader political climate, especially one that comes soon after a deluge of holidays that operatives warn could affect voter interest in politics.

In November, the incumbent senator, Perdue, won more votes than Ossoff but failed to reach the 50% threshold necessary to avoid a runoff in the state. Loeffler and Warnock, meanwhile, fended off fellow party challengers to receive the top two vote totals in their open-seat race.

Republican operatives are hopeful that without Trump on the ballot, the GOP can claw back some of the support it lost in the suburbs. Perdue, for instance, already performed better overall in Georgia than Trump did in November, winning 49.7% of the total vote in his race to Trump’s 49.3%.

The hope, they say, is GOP candidates can benefit from a Trump-like agenda while not suffering because of voters’ concerns about his tweets and rhetoric.

Anderson, who polled for a pro-Trump super PAC last year, said his research on the GOP’s problem with suburban voters suggested most of it wasn’t connected to policy proposals.

“Easily two-thirds of it was driven by Trump himself,” Anderson said. “The whole style-over-substance argument.”

Democrats, however, say they have been encouraged by early vote numbers in the state that show participation even from some people who didn’t cast a ballot in November. And in a sign of confidence about Biden’s continued popularity there, the president-elect is scheduled to campaign in the state on behalf of Warnock and Ossoff on Monday in what both parties expect to be a tight race.

“The Democrats’ ability to maintain their coalition in Georgia is an important indicator of how much we’ll carry the energy we saw in 2018 and in the presidential election going forward into the future,” Law said.

Trump is also scheduled to campaign in the state Monday.