Strike that last comment about Georgia. While it certainly appears that Abrams lost, it was very close.
Thank you. I was going to ask you what you were referring to, and my guess is that you posted about Kemp winning big when all of the smaller counties - rural GOP bastions - were in, but the more populous suburban/urban Atlanta area counties were still pending.
Currently Kemp holds a 70,000 vote lead (out of nearly 4 million votes cast) and election officials are still counting . . . Kemp has indicated he thinks his lead is insurmountable, which I suspect is an accurate appraisal even when all absentee and provisional ballots are counted. Abrams is not conceding, and I wouldn't expect her to any time soon. What's really interesting to me is that 538 had Kemp at +1.9% in its last poll prior to yesterday, and that's exactly where the margin currently is, with Kemp at 50.5% and Abrams at 48.4%. (The good news for me in this result is that at least we likely won't be seeing Kemp/Abrams ads for the next two weeks. The bad news is that there will be runoffs - see below - so the political ads will keep on coming for a while . . . .)
Other races of interest in Georgia are the close US House races in the 6th and 7th districts, neither of which is final at this point. Lucy McBath (D) has a 2100 vote lead over Karen Handel (R) currently, with ballot counting and potentially recounting still going on. GA-6 is the suburban Atlanta district that saw the special election last year between Jon Ossoff and Handel, which Handel won in a much closer race than the vacating incumbent - Tom Price - won by in the previous election. Nothing is impossible in this race, but I suspect that McBath will pull of the win here, which is a fascinating result. The district is one of the most highly educated and wealthy districts in Georgia, and has traditionally been a "safe" GOP seat for decades. BTW, the margins for this seat have been GOP +29/32/23 in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and the shift to Democratic in this race was +24 in 2018 (for a +1 margin, so far at least). So it's impossible to tell much about this result in terms of projecting future elections . . . I see it as most likely a highly educated, wealthy suburban district passing a negative judgment on Trumpism . . . who knows whether that will reverse, hold, accelerate or be simply a blip on the electoral radar.
GA-7 is another suburban Atlanta district that is formerly a GOP "safe" area, encompassing most of Gwinnett County. Gwinnett was for a long time the fastest growing county in GA and that growth has changed the demographics and voting patterns dramatically. The GOP candidate is the incumbent, Rob Woodall, and his strategy has been to be as much of a stealth candidate as possible. That left open a possibility for the Democratic candidate, Carolyn Bourdeaux, to brand herself, and she did a pretty decent job of doing so. Currently Woodall has a 3600 vote lead, which is likely enough to project Woodall as a winner.
Other state races are showing much closer than they've been in the recent past: The GOP candidate - an upstart who beat the GOP's "party" candidate in the primary - won Lt. Gov. 52-48% over a pretty good Democratic offering, and both the Secretary of State and an open Public Service Commission races are going to runoffs.
And then I saw this blurb in this morning's AJC:
Abrams also led a surge through Atlanta’s suburbs to carry Cobb and Gwinnett counties – two former GOP bastions that turned blue for the first time in decades in 2016. And she narrowly won Henry County, another suburban county that’s transformed from reliably red to perpetually purple.
Down the ticket, Republicans got clobbered in the suburbs. All three GOP-held seats in DeKalb flipped to Democrats, and powerful incumbents in Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett went down in flames while open seats flipped to young Democratic challengers.
If you want to read the whole, if brief, article, you can find it here:
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--reg...s-final-votes-counted/RrCkTLAxPcD93dIS1TQXHL/.
I haven't done any analysis of the local county down ballot results yet, so I can't comment on those, but the general observations above are interesting.