Kelly Loeffler is Paying the Price for her Rightward Lurch During the First Round
Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Lance Cheung
By: Logan Phillips
Date: 12/3
Facing a strong challenge by one of Trump’s most dedicated defenders in the first round of the Georgia special election, Kelly Loeffler went to great lengths to prove her Trump bonafides. While the election may have been in November, Loeffler ran the campaign as if she were in a Republican primary, and spent enormous sums of money on ads shoring up her conservative credentials. Loeffler underscored more than once that there were zero areas where she disagreed with the President.
Loeffler’s strategy paid off, and she successfully overcame Republican Doug Collins, who had a lead earlier in the race. However, now it’s beginning to look like Kelly Loeffler may be paying a pretty steep price for her victory.
A new poll by top pollsters Survey USA poll showed Loeffler is losing to her Democratic opponent, Raphael Warnock, by 6.4%, losing 51.6% to 45.3%. This is far worse than fellow Republican David Perdue, who the poll showed losing to Jon Ossoff beating Republican incumbent David Perdue by just over one percent, 49.6% to 48.4%.
Loeffler’s primary strategy was inherently risky, because it was always going to make her a less attractive candidate to more moderate voters. As Joe Biden proved this past November, the days of easy Republican statewide wins in Georgia are a thing of the past. Unlike Perdue, who SurveyUSA found was winning 5% of Democrats, Loeffler only drew support from 1%.
This poll was a good sign for Warnock, who held a similar lead before the primary, but has been on the receiving end of tens of millions of dollars worth of attack ads. We can only put so much stock into one poll, and errors across the country should remind us to be prepared for the potential of considerable polling misfires. However, this is the clearest sign we have that Warnock continued to be in a strong position - and this is by a pollster that was very close to the final results for both Senate races and the Presidential election.
Photo Credit: John Ramspott
It might be even better news for Jon Ossoff. The first polls immediately after the general election showed him slightly behind David Perdue - who trailed by 1.8% on election day. In their last poll before election day, SurveyUSA found Ossoff down by 3% against Perdue, so this represents a four-point gain for him. Democrat's chances of winning both seats and by extension the Senate majority has risen to 42.4% in our Forecast, the highest total since the General Election.
One of the other reasons Loeffler might be struggling to win over more than 1% of Democrats is that she has positioned herself as one of the most explicitly anti-Black Lives Matters politicians in the country. While many Republicans have stressed their opposition to certain planks of the group or emphasized their frustration with the small minority of protests that have turned violent, Loeffler has gone far further and painted the entire group under extreme, sinister terms.
“I adamantly oppose the Black Lives Matter political movement,” Loeffler wrote in a letter to the head of the WNBA. “Which has advocated for the defunding of police, called for the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure, harbored anti-Semitic views, and promoted violence and destruction across the country”
According to exit polls from the general election, her position is out of touch with the majority of Georgians, who approve of Black Lives Matter 53% to 43%. It also serves as a central contrast in her Senate race against Raphael Warnock, who is the pastor for Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was at the very center of the civil rights movement. Warnock is the latest in a long chain of pastors including Martin Luther King that has championed the advancement of equal rights for African Americans. Loeffler claims to be in favor of criminal justice reform, but it’s hard to take her claim too seriously when she has been such a fierce opponent to the goals of the largest civil rights marches since the 1960s. Ironically, the opponents of the Civil Rights Movement also tried to portray the entire movement as infiltrated by communists. Sometimes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The conventional wisdom has long been that voters in Georgia are unlikely to split their vote between the two races. However, I think we’ve seen a pretty significant amount of evidence to say that we can’t take this for granted anymore. While I believe the most likely outcome will be a double victory for one party, if the primary is extremely close, there’s a very real possibility that both David Perdue and Raphael Warnock could end up in the Senate next term.
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