Look for a July 14 special “non-partisan” election slugfest in state House of Representatives District 80 which covers much of the Brookhaven part of DeKalb County as well as lower/southeast Sandy Springs in Fulton County. (Over 70 percent of the voters reside in the DeKalb portion.) Brookhaven Mayor J. Max Davis (son of the late conservative Republican state Rep. Max Davis Sr.) is poised to run against libertarian attorney Catherine Bernard.
Specifically, the district includes part of Brookhaven’s Capitol City Golf Club (the Fulton part of that club is in Rep. Beth Beskin’s House District 54) and includes the Peachtree Golf Club founded by golf great Bobby Jones. Other landmarks in the DeKalb part of district include Oglethorpe University, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church and School and Marist (Catholic) High School. The Fulton side of the district includes the busy 285/400 interchange and “Pill Hill” (hospitals such as St. Joseph’s and Northside).
As of last October, according to the Secretary of State’s office, House District 80 had 29,334 active registered voters— 21,129 on the DeKalb side and 8,205 on the Fulton side. Overall, the district was 11% black, 71% white, 3% Asian, 2% Hispanic and 13% “others” (multiracial, no race listed, etc.)
The district votes Republican in statewide races (though not as Republican as districts in east Cobb and far north Fulton). Republican statewide candidates last year averaged 58% of the vote in the district, though now-U.S. Sen. David Perdue led Democrat Michelle Nunn by only a modest margin, 52-46% Gov. Nathan Deal got 54% here against Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter and in the 2012 presidential election Mitt Romney led Barack Obama by a 56-43% margin.
Not surprisingly, given the presence of two golf clubs in the district, the GOP primary electorate leans more toward the “country-club” side— more fiscally than socially conservative. In the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Romney got nearly half (49%) of the vote in this district (under the district’s current boundaries), well ahead of the 32% Newt Gingrich received and even farther ahead of the 10% for Rick Santorum and 8% for libertarian Ron Paul. In that summer’s GOP primary (the regular statewide primary), the district voted narrowly against “personhood” (one of less than a handful of GOP-held House districts that rejected this measure supported by pro-life groups). In the May 2014 U.S. Senate primary, the district gave a plurality to Perdue (37%), with Karen Handel in second at 30% and Jack Kingston in third with 18%. The two most conservative candidates, Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey, each finished with less than 10% of the vote in the district.
Perhaps the liberal/libertarian leanings of the district as a whole (including not just GOP voters, but independents and Democrats) were evident in 2012 when the district voted 82% for Sunday (retail) alcohol sales.
The special election has been caused by the resignation of Rep. Mike Jacobs, who is assuming a state court judgeship. Interestingly, Republican Davis ran against Jacobs back in 2004 (when Jacobs was a Democrat) in the “old” House District 80, which prior to 2011 redistricting was confined to northwest DeKalb County, running from I-285 in the north to LaVista Road near Emory. Back then, the district was about evenly divided, as became clear when Jacobs defeated Davis for the seat by less than 400 votes (a 51to 49% margin). Redistricting following the 2010 census made the district more Republican friendly by subtracting Democratic precincts in DeKalb south of Buford Highway and adding GOP-leaning areas of southeast Sandy Springs. Jacobs switched to the GOP in 2007, claiming his “strong belief in fiscal responsibility and restraint” was “not a good fit within the Democratic Caucus in the House” (from the late writer Dick Pettys’s column on the switch in InsiderAdvantage, June 20, 2007).
