Herschel Walker relied on a base strategy that had everything except a strategy and a base.
Lessons from the Georgia runoff
I enjoy mindless pundit blather in the morning as much as the next fellow, but I found myself hitting the mute button a lot more often leading up to the Georgia Senate runoff. I know it’s good for ratings to hype every race by going full Rather:
"This race is tight like a too-small bathing suit on a too-long ride home from the beach."
"This race is hotter than a Times Square Rolex."
"This situation in Ohio would give an aspirin a headache.''
But it’s long been clear to anyone with a brain that Herschel Walker was going to lose the Senate runoff.
It’s said that during one of his presidential campaigns, Adlai Stevenson was congratulated by an enthusiastic supporter who said, “Governor, you have the support of every thinking American.” To which Stevenson replied, “yes, but I need a majority.”
I’ve written previously in this space about why polling is broken, and why the Georgia Senate race was a prime example of this, I cited Dan Pfeiffer’s observation in his
:“When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? Almost all polling calls are marked “potential spam” by the iPhone. A few years ago, someone involved in the Obama data team told me that the response rate for our polls dropped 50 percent from 2008 to 2012 and then 50 percent again in 2016. It’s safe to say that Democrats aren’t the ones answering calls from unknown numbers and then spending a considerable amount of time on the phone with strangers.”
And also this from the National Journal headlined “Horse-Race Polls Are Not Fixable”
“The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.”
“We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible.”
So, in Georgia, it turned out that the Senate race wasn’t Rather-close but rather won by an energized electorate that was enthusiastic about a great candidate, and completely turned off by an incompetent one.
I think Warnock’s victory margin would have been even bigger if fascist wannabes like Lindsay Graham and Senator John Kennedy hadn’t turned up the heat on hate.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a candidate as unqualified as Herschel Walker would be rejected by anyone who spent more than half a minute thinking about the race. But the challenge was turning opinions into votes.
A slogan I like to use in campaigns is “Your vote is your voice—use it!” Not everyone sees that connection, and that’s why grassroots organizers exist.
Here’s Dan Pfeiffer’s analysis of Warnock’s victory:
Georgia’s outcome is not an accident. It wasn’t the result of inevitable demographic change. Georgia has become a competitive state because Stacey Abrams, Latosha Brown and a group of mostly Black woman organizers made it so. Last night’s victory is the result of a decade-long project to build sustainable progressive power in the Republican state. For years, their efforts were dismissed by national party members. Abrams’ 2018 campaign was seen as a long shot because of the partisan makeup of the state. But political change is painstakingly slow up until the moment it’s breathtakingly sudden.
Exactly right! There are 159 counties in Georgia, the most in any state other than Texas. Raphael Warnock won 30 of them. But “as expected,” the pundits now tell us, Democrat ran up big margins in Atlanta and ended up with a comfortable win.
But expectations were far from certain in Georgia, until the organizing blitz Dan Pfeiffer cited above.
I live in one of the upstate New York districts that ended up determining control of the House. The Democrat running for Congress told me he’d win so long as Kathy Hochul won by double digits. Well, that’s not going to happen, I said. In the current climate, I thought she’d win by four or five points, which turned out to be the case. ( I wish there had been more of an effort to turn out a huge Democratic base than appeal to “persuadable independents,” whoever they were.)
(I proposed a slogan that turned out to be prescient: “The House is now controlled by a six seat majority. What if it was one seat? What if it was this one?)
So, while I would love a double-digit progressive majority in my District and also in Georgia, for now, I’ll take a Warnock shellacking of 100,000 votes and three points, as of this writing.
Georgia may not be a purple enough state—yet—to elect Stacey Abrams Governor, or reject Herschel Walker in a landslide, but neither did a Republican base mobilize to support the ultimate RINO, Herschel Walker. (I bet he wishes he’d never answered that phone call from Donald Trump—is this what he thought he was getting into?)
Trump’s voters weren’t enough to elect Herschel Walker, or Dr. Oz and Blake Masters, for that matter. And their numbers will keep shrinking, once Trump realizes he doesn’t have any primaries to run in and can’t do anything resembling “winning.” (Especially when he starts losing in court).
Republicans don’t have a base strategy—they have a sinkhole.