An InsiderAdvantage subscriber (a Republican) wrote us yesterday with an observation that many observers of the Dec. 6th runoff between Republican Herschel Walker and the winning Democrat incumbent Raphael Warnock may have missed. He lamented that “Republican voters failed to turn out.”
And he’s talking about Republicans who are registered voters.
“In round numbers there are 7,000,000 registered voters in Georgia,” he wrote, “and 3,000,000 of whom voted in the runoff. This means that 4,000,000 voters didn’t bother to vote. The margin was about 40,000, which means that Republican voters could have impacted the outcome and didn’t.” (Of course, there are a lot of Democrats who are registered who didn’t vote, too.)
The conclusion? Even though Warnock barely won, Democrats were more energized to get out and vote. In some key reliably Republican precincts around the state, GOP voter turnout surprisingly didn’t match that of November 8th.
Check out the statewide vote totals county by county in Georgia’s Senate runoff that handed President Joe Biden and his party a key win. The result is that the U.S. Senate in January will have a majority Democrat 51-to-49 vote split after a two-year 50-50 divide.
Interestingly, too, is that our research indicates this is the first mid-term election since 1934 where the party in power (the Democrats) defended every Senate seat. (And this with all major polls continuing to indicate Democrat President Joe Biden is the most unpopular president of modern times.)
Republican strategists and pundits note that Warnock far outspent Walker, and it particularly showed in the expensive television ad wars.
Another InsiderAdvantage reader has this succinct election post-mortem: “Herschel may have been an inarticulate candidate but so was (Pennsylvania’s Democrat U.S. Senate candidate) John Fetterman, and he won. Herschel’s ads were not dynamic enough to counter Warnock’s. And he didn’t have near the money.”
