Have Georgia voters become a ticket-splitting electorate? A new poll from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution appears to show a remarkably flexible approach to the midterms by Peach State voters. According to the poll commissioned by the AARP, Governor Brian Kemp handily leads Stacey Abrams in his re-election bid, but Republican challenger Herschel Walker trails Senate Democrat incumbent Raphael Warnock by three points.
Is a ten-point swing a reasonable level of ticket-splitting, especially in Georgia?
The poll of likely voters commissioned by the Georgia chapter of the AARP shows Republican Gov. Brian Kemp with a comfortable 52-45% edge over his Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock is in a tighter contest against Republican Senate hopeful Herschel Walker. Warnock is at 50% in the poll compared to Walker’s 47%. That’s within the margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.
It’s the latest survey to suggest a significant number of voters are casting bipartisan ballots, a trend we explored in an article earlier this week. Kemp outdid Walker by seven points, while Warnock garnered about 5 points more support than Abrams.
“This poll shows what we saw in June 2020 that no one really believed back then: This is a purple state,” said John Anzalone, who is perhaps best known as President Joe Biden’s pollster. “This is the new North Carolina. And this might be a ticket splitting state.”
Does this seem reasonable? Maybe, given Walker’s fumbles on the campaign trail, but only in a cycle where the playing field is reasonably equal. This would require us to believe that Kemp is magically much more popular than ever after a contentious narrow victory in a Dem-friendly cycle in 2018, while Warnock is somehow able to overcome Kemp’s coattails. That’s a bit tough to believe.
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And the sample data makes it even more difficult to swallow. The AJC/AARP poll sample is almost evenly split on a partisan basis:
However, the gubernatorial turnout in the Democratic mini-wave election four years ago looked quite different:
Bear in mind that independents turned out and broke for Abrams in large part because of Donald Trump’s unpopularity in those midterms. That cycle had a stable economy, low unemployment, and low crime, too. The political winds in this cycle are not just blowing in the other direction, they’re hitting gale force if not outright hurricane strength.
Given all those changes, are we to believe that Republican turnout will decrease in an election cycle in which Joe Biden’s job approval is 34/65, as it is in this poll? And that an increase in independents in this environment would end up boosting a first-term Senate Democrat incumbent that has walked in lock-step with Biden for the last eighteen months? Both are impossible to swallow, even in a model where turnout increases over 2018, because Joe Biden won’t be generating that kind of enthusiasm … at least not for Warnock and Abrams.
Georgia may be a purple state, and it may even be a ticket-splitting state by now. Walker and his campaign definitely has its issues, and a gap between the levels of support for Kemp and Walker is very plausible. However, there is no way that GOP turnout goes down and Democrat and independent turnout go up in this cycle, not even in deep-blue states. Take this poll with at least a small grain of salt, except as proof that Kemp’s about to roll all over Abrams this time around.
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