How Democrats Won The Georgia Runoff
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It was a rough morning, Galen. I had to make my own bed. You know, really wanted to make sure the room looked presentable for the podcast. Now you know what it's like to be me every single day we record the podcast because there's my bed right there. Even with COVID, I woke up this morning and I was like, you know what? First and foremost, I got to make my bed because those YouTube viewers, they're going to be watching.

Hello and welcome to this Georgia runoff edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. Folks, the 2022 midterms have come to an end with Senator Raphael Warnock beating Herschel Walker in the Senate runoff in Georgia. At the time of recording this podcast on Wednesday morning, Warnock has an almost three-point lead.

That lead could grow slightly as the tallying is finalized. But what we do know is that while this was a very competitive race, it was not ultimately a nail biter. By 10.30 p.m. Eastern, three and a half hours after the polls closed, decision desks had made the call. Today, we're going to take a look at how this election compares with the one in November and past runoffs and what it tells us about Georgia's politics going forward and the two parties' coalitions.

We'll also ask what this all means for Trump's influence at party. His handpicked candidate, Hershel Walker, was the only statewide Republican to lose in Georgia. No other Republican even had to go to a runoff. And the guy Trump picked a fight with, Brian Kemp, won re-election by seven and a half points. Here with me to talk about it all is politics reporter Alex Samuels, who is on the ground in Georgia. Alex, how's it going? Good. How are you, Galen?

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. How were the election night watch parties last night? They were fun. I'm excited to talk about what I saw each, but they were both fun in their own way. All right. All day with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen. And senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hey, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen.

You have the most sort of subdued, almost angry way of saying hello when I introduce you on the podcast. Audrey and I have been shadowing me while I edit the podcast. When we I edited the podcast on Monday, I was like, is there any way to edit this to make it not sound like Nathaniel wants to kill me? Wow, the tensions come out.

No, Galen. I'm always very happy to see you. Hello, Galen. Good morning. See, that is what I expect. Thank you. Thank you. Also, apologies if I sound a little gruff today. I am a bit under the weather, but I'm here and we're going to do it.

First question, did this even feel like an election night, not staying up until 2 o'clock in the morning? No, it was weird. Or let me guess, Nathaniel, you stayed up until 2 o'clock in the morning anyway. I did. I normally go to bed around 1, but Galen, you're the one who made me get up at the ungodly hour of 9 a.m. to record this podcast. There you go. Jeff, Alex, did you manage to get to sleep at a godly hour?

Personally, I did. I think around, I was home before midnight. Once Warnock gave his final speech and we shuttered the live blog, I zoomed on out of there and was back in my hotel before midnight. So I got a good night's rest. Yeah, Alex, let's start off with some of the color from the campaign trail. You were at the watch parties for both candidates last night.

What were they like? Were the supporters surprised at all by the results? I spent most of the night at Herschel Walker's watch party, which was at the college football hall of fame. Um,

I am not super familiar with how election night watch parties work, but it was 7 o'clock. Polls had just closed, and it seemed like there were more media there than actual people, Walker supporters there. As the night went on, that definitely changed. There were a lot of supporters. They were broadcasting returns from Fox News, and they had a country music singer there. I

Had a ton of food, ton of alcohol. Everyone was just really excited. Of course, early on in the night when it was a 50-50 race, that's when you started to hear everyone, you know, yell and like run to the front of the screen to really get close to the TV and everything like that. And you had a couple...

just kind of pumping up the crowd and whatnot. But then as the night went on and it became more obvious that Warnock was, you know, had a bit of an edge. That's when I went over to the Warnock party, which conveniently was just a four minute drive away. And the Warnock party was just,

It was a party. They had a whole DJ. They had... The Cupid Shuffle was playing. By the time I got there, to be clear, CNN had just called the race for Warnock. So...

It made sense why everyone was so excited. But, you know, overall, I'd say supporters for both men were just really energized last night and both had very good showings at their event. And what did the two candidates have to say? I mean, did Herschel Walker concede in a timely manner? And what did Warnock have to say about, you know, his victory after all of these these elections over the past two years?

Yeah. So I did not stick around, unfortunately for Walker's concession. Um, but he did, um, I did see a few tweets that he ended up conceding to Warnock. He said, essentially, I'm not going to make any excuses now, um, because we put up a heck of a fight. Um, so it doesn't seem like he's going to, you know, challenge the results of the race. Um,

Warnock, meanwhile, had a little bit of a longer speech, you know, offering some of the usual platitudes that candidates do after they win an election, you know, thanking voters for electing him to a six-year term in the Senate. What I found interesting was his quote actually on voter suppression. He said something to the effect of, you know, people will look at the outcome of this race and say that there is no voter suppression in Georgia. Yeah.

And his message to voters was, you know, let me be clear. Voters endured the rain, the cold, all types of tricks just to vote. And that doesn't mean that voter suppression doesn't exist. It just means that voters have said that their voices won't be silenced. So I think it was, you know, the tone of both of their speeches were very different.

It was a very, dare I say, presidential speech from Warnock. Really? It's almost like someone put them on their lineup for a potential candidate. Who could you be referring to, Alex? So, I mean, when he's talking about voter suppression, I know that in this runoff specifically, the length of time for early voting was shortened by more than half.

Is that mostly what he was referring to? Did he say exactly what he meant? Obviously, in this environment where we're taking sort of accepting the results of elections very seriously, like it's important to be specific about these things. So is it clear what he meant?

Yes. So he did mention the shortened runoff campaign period. So it was four weeks this year compared to 2021, where it was closer to nine weeks. And then more recently, state officials had also attempted to limit early voting and to not have voting the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And Warnock mentioned that as well. But Democrats, including Senator Warnock, challenged that in court and they ended up winning that effort. And so voters were able to go and cast their ballots that Saturday as well.

Got it. All right. So let's dig into some of the results here. In the first round of voting in November, Warnock led Walker by about a point. And now it looks like he's going to win by about three points. So it's not a totally different outcome, but there were some differences with November. Jeffrey, where did we see those changes in either, you know, turnout or persuasion?

Oh, well, I mean, I think you can just start out by saying that turnout was down from the November election, which was to be expected. Basically, the history of statewide runoffs in Georgia is the turnout goes down. And it's very unusual across runoffs as a whole. It's more unusual than not to see higher turnout in the second election than in the first. So to some extent, I think, you know, parts of both bases turned out at a lower level. Now, the fact that Warnock is

improved on his margin might suggest that Republican turnout was down more than Democratic turnout. But that's kind of hard to say just from the top line numbers. I think what we can say looking at the state of Georgia, like if you look at a county map and sort of where the changes occurred, Walker did better in northern Georgia, basically north of sort of the core Atlanta area,

He did a point, two points, three points better in all the counties in the northern part of the state. And then basically south of that, it's either that Warnock did better or there wasn't much change from November. So in the Atlanta area, Warnock did better pretty uniformly than he did in November. And so if you're thinking about where most of the votes are in the state, if you're doing a couple points better, three points better,

In big suburban counties like Cobb or Gwinnett or the two sort of core – like main Atlanta, the city itself, counties of Fulton and DeKalb, if you're doing two, three, four points better in those places, that's a lot of votes potentially in terms of sort of the shift there.

So for Warnock, that performance was was definitely key to him doing even better than he did in November and winning by roughly three points statewide. Does anyone have a sense of the why here? Like why Walker did better in the northwestern part of the state and then Warnock did better or even elsewhere? Yeah.

I think that one – just one thought I've had and it's – you can't say that this is like one – like the total explanation for it. But I was looking at where the libertarian did best.

in the November election. This is the third candidate in the race in November who was the reason that neither Warnock or Walker got a majority in November because he was winning about 2% statewide. And if you look at where the Libertarian did best, it was in the northern part of the state. So it is possible that

This area, which is very red outside of Atlanta, that you had some voters who didn't want to vote for Walker but are conservative-leading, and maybe to some extent those voters showed up and voted for Walker in the runoff, or they didn't show up, period, because actually if you also look at where turnout was down the most –

that part of the state tended to have slightly lower turnout than some of the other areas. Also in the general election, you saw Walker kind of underperform Kemp by the most in highly educated precincts. And so I think, you know, you can surmise from that that enthusiasm for Walker may have been lower in, you know, the kind of hoity-toity suburban areas of the state. And that's that helped Warnock, obviously. Yeah.

You mentioned that turnout was down and that historically we expect turnout to be down in these kinds of runoff elections. But how does it compare to past runoffs? Like, was it still relatively high? Or so, in other words, did this look more like a 2021 Georgia runoff or say a 20, you know, 14 Georgia runoff?

I mean my view of it is that it's somewhat akin to what we saw in the 2020-2021 cycle of first election and then the runoff in the sense that turnout remained close to what happened in November. Like there were some runoffs prior to 2020 that you would see in Georgia where the turnout would fall by like 40, 50, 60 percent.

And it just wasn't like that at all. Like the electorate looked more like the November electorate because fewer – just there was a smaller drop-off from November. And that just speaks to maybe a higher level of engagement, the fact that these Senate races were very important in a very closely divided Senate. Like there's a lot of attention being paid, a lot of money being spent on these races. So –

In that sense, I think it was more like what we saw a couple of years ago. Yeah. So to put some numbers on it, about 3.5 million ballots were cast in this runoff election compared to 4 million in the general election, which means that the turnout in the runoff was 89 percent of what it was in the general election in 2020 and 2021.

turnout in the runoff was 91% of what it was in the general election. So you saw a similar level of drop off, which is to say not very much. It really is quite remarkable for a runoff to drive that basically, you know, almost as much turnout as the regularly scheduled election. Alex, what was your experience of this on the ground? I mean, did it feel like you were covering, you know, basically a midterm election?

It was weird because I went to, you know, an event for Warnock and an event for Walker. And of course, you know, you have these voters who obviously know who they're going to vote for and they were very engaged for their respective candidates. But then on the flip side, I went to a few polling places on election day. And I want to be clear that I only went to like four and they were all in kind of the Atlanta-ish area. There was like a country club, an elementary school, a library. I tried to get some diversity in there. And there were like,

not a ton of people. You know, I was expecting, you know, maybe longer lines. And I know there were long lines in other parts of the state. I just unfortunately was not able to travel to all of them. But yeah,

there was just kind of like a stillness almost on election day in the lead up to, uh, polls being closed. It felt like a couple of people were, you know, trickling in and out of the polling places, but it wasn't like this overwhelming, you know, you hear stories of lines wrapped around the door. People say, you know, everyone, you know, if you're in line and it's seven o'clock stay in line. But I really didn't see that at least from where I was. Um, so that to me felt the most weird. Um,

But in terms of, you know, the people who were excited for Warnock, the people who were excited for Walker, that going to those events mostly made it feel more like a regular midterm election.

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As we've discussed on this podcast, Brian Kemp, the governor, won re-election by seven and a half points statewide. Warnock has now won his statewide election by three points. How does Warnock's coalition look different from other statewide Democrats in Georgia when we talk about both demography, geography, what have you? Like, what is Warnock doing that other Democrats couldn't?

And obviously, there's a flip side here, which is that the candidates on the Republican side are different. But I think, as we discussed on the Monday podcast with Tia Mitchell and Greg Blustein, Warnock has a different way of campaigning than some of the other Democrats in Georgia.

At least comparing Warnock to Abrams. Abrams was looking to court more like liberal, you know, younger voters. And I think Warnock was maybe moving toward the middle a bit, trying to get maybe those voters who liked Kemp but weren't, you know, big Walker supporters or even courting more independent voters. So I think maybe that could have been one difference in their coalitions.

Yeah, I mean my thought is a couple things. One is that Warnock managed to win obviously in the 2021 runoff and so he actually held the office. And we do know that even though the incumbency advantage, like how much people get out of incumbency politically from an electoral standpoint is –

Not quite what it once was, but I do think Warnock was able to talk about things that he had done in the Senate. I mean just like name-checking Republican senators he had worked with on things that are not particularly partisan. And I think just even being able to talk about that sort of thing helps you to some extent and maybe makes him more attractive to maybe some of those Kemp voters in northern Fulton County, Florida.

or places that, to Nathaniel's earlier point, like highly educated white voters who maybe lean a little Republican, but they liked Warnock and Walker was not a good candidate. And so in this environment, they may have decided to basically vote for most of the Republican candidates on the ballot, but I like Warnock, I'll vote for him. So that I think is an important part of

of how he won in the end. And I think it's hard to separate, though, how much Walker as clearly like the worst Republican candidate on the ticket statewide from that. Like, it's difficult to know for sure. Are there specific counties that help tell this story? I know that you were watching last night as the results were coming in how certain counties results compared with November and compared with past elections in Georgia. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's probably changed within certain counties. Like, okay, so Fulton. Fulton is mostly Atlanta, but there are also a number of suburban sort of towns and cities around the actual city of Atlanta, not the metro area. So these are like towns and cities that are part of the metro area that historically many of them are more Republican-leaning and yet

Warnock was carrying some of them or running very close to Walker in them. And these are places that are sort of wealthy, whiter suburbs, though, of course, it is important. And I know Alex has written about this like

Georgia has gotten more diverse and we know nationally that the suburbs have gotten more diverse. So it's sort of, I think, a mix of what's going on nationally with the Democratic coalition, where you have more white college educated voters turning to the Democrats nationally.

And at the same time, when you're talking about the suburbs as a whole, you're talking about increasingly diverse suburbs in terms of racial and ethnic diversity. And we know that those voters tend to lean Democratic. So these different factors I think helped Warnock in these places. And I know The New York Times did a cool analysis of the initial November election looking at like the 88 precincts.

statewide that voted for Kemp and Warnock. So out of the many, many precincts in the entire state, only 88 split which one they went for. But these are places where they were highly concentrated in the suburbs of Atlanta, particularly the northern suburbs. So that's the area I think to really look at for Warnock's path to victory and what is still maybe, you know, it's a purple state, but with, if you're really digging into it, has a slight Republican lean to it still.

Yeah, let's talk about that question. I think we can say that Georgia is a competitive state. I don't know what color exactly you want to assign to it. And if you would like to look at the Pantone selection and tell me a color you're more than welcome to. But Georgia just elected every statewide Republican except Senate. But also Georgia has two Democratic senators in Washington.

When we look at everything that's happened in Georgia, say between 2018 and 2022, are we looking at a state that still leans more Republican or a state where you would say Democrats have the advantage? In, again, in a neutral environment. And obviously the environment we're in right now probably leans Republican slightly. If you had to pick one, it's clearly slightly Republican leaning. In the 2020 election,

Georgia was about four percentage points to the right of the nation as a whole, looking at the kind of national popular vote. And, you know, obviously we saw, again, to your point, you know, Georgia Republicans won something like eight out of the nine statewide races this year. So so, yeah, you know, like.

blue georgia you know the point where georgia becomes a virginia or something you know which is to say a blue but maybe still competitive state that's still a long time away if that'll ever happen you know look at the experience of north carolina after 2008 um a lot of democrats thought oh demographics are on our side there and nope um but but yeah but i also think that like you know

Like, yeah, it's a little bit of a false choice, right? Like, I mean, it's a competitive state. It's going to be a competitive state in 2024. You know, that's all that really matters right now.

Yeah, I think the truth about Georgia's political meaning, what color it is, it kind of lies like somewhere in the middle or between like the two competing narratives that we're hearing now about Georgia's political future. You know, runoffs are weird. And I think Warnock's victory tells us a lot about the importance of things like candidate quality, turnout and campaign strength, you know.

as it does about the state's political future. You know, I think the state's hue is likely to vary depending on who's running and how much money they have and how energized voters feel. But I do think that Warnock's second runoff victory is a sign that the state is getting more competitive and that Georgia Republicans can't just coast by here anymore.

Yeah, look, the state's magenta, guys. I was just looking this up. It's periwinkle. It's like it's got a reddish, it's like purple, but with a little bit of a reddish hue or something. Like, okay, I don't know. Vermilion. You said something about, I looked at a color wheel, Gail, in response to your thing, so.

I'm Googling right now, Pantone colors of purple. So if we want to get nerdy about this for a minute, the real debate is when you're making an election map, is neutral white or is it purple, right? So like we talk about light red, light blue, which implies that neutral is white. But then we talk about purple states, which implies that neutral is purple and that you're just blending the red and the blue together. So it's like a two color scale or three color scale. So like...

These are the things I think about when I'm up at 2 a.m. Well, hey, if we're doing like maps and stuff, make white the neutral because there we go. All right. Jeffrey has a position. That's the only way it can work. If you make purple the neutral, it's just going to look real weird. Okay. That's a good point. Chloroputh, Matt. I am going to say it's Pantone 8085C. Okay.

What color is that? I couldn't tell you because it doesn't have a name on this color palette that I'm looking at. It just has a number, but that's my vote for what color it is. Galen, I think I was coming in at like, what is it? Like B E four one a seven, which I roughly categorized as a magenta. Okay. We're getting carried away here, but

Yes. I want to actually get to something that Alex said, because I know that it will create some debate here on the podcast, which is that campaigns matter. Nathaniel is not a campaigns matter person. But it looks like in this election, both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side, they mattered quite a bit. And you can say, oh, the degree to which they matter is less because of increased polarization or what have you. But also, it's...

It kind of undoes itself because if the margins are smaller because there is increased polarization and also candidate quality matters less, but as a proportion of the vote or of the margin, it may still matter just as much. You know, you get what I'm saying, Nathaniel?

Right. I mean, so clearly campaigns and candidate quality did matter in this race. And a lot of that is because Georgia is such a close state and it was kind of right on the edge. But like you clearly can compare like because you saw such consistency with the Republican ticket in November.

right? Republicans won like basically between 52 and 54% of the vote, no matter who it was, unless you were Herschel Walker. Brian Kemp did this. Brad Raffensperger did this. Chris Carr, the attorney general, did this. All kind of down the ballot. There were still differences. Like Brad Raffensperger did the best of any Republican candidate. And then the lieutenant governor who was kind of like

not part of the coalition of statewide Republicans. He had Trump's endorsement, too. Yeah, he had Trump's endorsement and he was not part of the sort of group of Raffensperger and Kemp and the former lieutenant governor who wouldn't like mess around with the 2020 election, did the worst of all of them. So even their candidate quality matters. Yeah, but he still had like 52. Sure, right. But like, okay, I mean...

Like, okay, when I say, you know, like campaign quality doesn't matter on this podcast, like, I'm not me. I don't mean that like, it literally never matters because but like, I think when we're talking about differences between 54% and 52%, I think we can all agree that like, that is extremely small. Um,

Um, this was bigger, right? You know, Warren or Walker got, what was it in the first round? 48%. Um, so, you know, that was, you know, a, like a five point gap between him and Kemp. Um, and that obviously was enough to send it to a runoff, which he was not able to win. And because it kind of straddled that 50% line, it mattered. That said, I do think we should know, like by Georgia standards, it was a pretty big gap. Like Jeffrey has written about this, but like in a lot of other states, um,

Five point gap. You would look at Brian Kemp, who is like, you know, Mr. Like dignified Republican stood up to Donald Trump, but still very conservative versus Herschel Walker, who has about 80 bazillion scandals surrounding him. You know, maybe he doesn't even live in Georgia. And the fact that there was only a five point gap between them, like that's a lot of Republicans still voting for Walker. That that is a.

strong testament to the power of partisanship. So I mean, it depends on your perspective, right? But like, yes, I will absolutely concede that in this race, the outcome was determined by candidate quality. Okay, so those are some of the specifics of what happened in Georgia. From a national perspective, Democrats now have a 51 seat majority in the Senate is an outright majority, not a 5050 tie like they've had for the past two years.

We've talked a little bit about what difference this makes in terms of getting things through committee faster, not having to rely so much on Kamala Harris. Now that it has actually happened, is there anything else that we should sort of keep in mind here? Yeah, I mean, I think putting this midterm election in context with past midterms is

It's sort of useful for understanding that it was something of an asterisk election. We've talked about that throughout. And the fact is, in the House, Democrats lost nine seats net, which is very small for the president's party. And in the Senate, they actually gained one seat. And they did this while not losing a single seat that they held that was up. And the last time that happened was 1934, when obviously that was –

perhaps the best midterm a president's party has ever had. Um, so that I'm not saying this is the, the first midterm of the new deal for Democrats, um, cause they were gaining everywhere in that, uh, not losing ground like they did in the house this time around. But I think it just puts in context that this was a very good midterm for the president's party. Uh, so, uh,

To me, that sort of is indicative that that happened while President Biden was still relatively unpopular. I mean, not unbelievably unpopular, but clearly a majority of the country disapproved of his performance. And we had polling suggesting that people who disapproved of the president still voted for Democrats at a pretty decent clip.

Whereas I think in the past, there's a certain expectation that people disapproving of the president were going to end up voting for the other party. But I think because of things that we've seen with the Republican Party, Donald Trump's influence, some of these Senate candidates in particular, that Republicans just weren't an attractive alternative for a lot of voters who weren't necessarily happy with the state of the country. But they said, eh, that's like a bridge too far. So –

That seems like – and obviously like abortion plays into that and the decision by the Supreme Court and that motivated a lot of Democrats. But I think it was also just an unusual policy win for the party, not in the White House. The party didn't control government and I think there was a reaction to that as well that plays into what happened here. So it's an asterisk midterm. I think it really, really does meet that threshold. Yeah.

There are two other things I want to get to before I let you all go and I go back to sleep, which is one, the polls. The polls did pretty well here, right? They did.

Indeed they did. Our final polling average showed Warnock with a four point lead, uh, and he ended up winning by about three as we discussed. So yeah, pretty much right on the money, which was also true with the general election polls in Georgia. They nailed the governor's race and were only two points off in the first round of the Senate race. And of course that is part of, in general, it was a good year for polls, particularly nonpartisan polls in 2022. So, uh,

For everybody who is like, it's going to be a make or break cycle for the polling, it looks like it was make. We love to hear it. Thank God. Thank God. We can all keep our jobs for now. I know. And that is 2022 on the books.

Democrats win 51 seats in the Senate. Republicans win 49. Republicans win 222 seats in the House. Democrats win 212. I have that right. I'm just saying that off the top of my head. Is that actually the correct number? They won 213. They will have 212 because of a death. Yeah, because Don McKeishen from Virginia passed away. That's awful. And...

So there will have to be a special election to fill his seat. But it's a pretty Democratic seat. So presumably once a special happens there, Democrats will be at 213. Nobody else resigns, which they will. Yeah, I mean, and of course someone might resign. So will we ever have a full House of 435? No, we won't. It's been hard to do in this current Congress that's outgoing. So yeah. They haven't done it. We'll see.

Yeah, I was like, I don't think they've done it the entire time. Hasn't been full house since 2019, I believe. Now that we can officially say that the 2022 midterms are behind us, welcome my friends to 2024, which I say jokingly in part because I know you all don't want to talk about 2024 right now, but this closes out a

where Trump's handpicked candidates did poorly. Like even when they won, like J.D. Vance, they did really badly.

We talked ad nauseum about how much electability mattered for Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election. The majority of Democrats said in poll after poll after poll that they were prioritizing electability over the candidate that matched their policy preferences. And I think this is true.

an emotion that may come with being the party out of power. Like, yes, you may have your policy preferences, but ultimately none of that matters if you can't seize power in Washington. I don't know that we've gotten a lot of this type of poll yet from Republican voters and how they're viewing this, but can we talk a little bit about the dynamics here? Like, does this

I know some folks at FiveThirtyEight have been skeptical about the takes, the analysis that Trump is beleaguered and may not necessarily have the advantage in 2024. But how are we thinking about it right now, now that Georgia is behind us? I mean, it seems to me that Trump had about the worst midterm he could have had.

All the worst in 2018. Well, I mean, in the sense of this midterm him. Yes, I know. I'm kidding. As a president out of not. No, not in Nathaniel. I disagree. I disagree. I think it was worse than 2018. Interesting. They gained Senate seats in 2018. So he still had something to point to as a victory. That's fair. And yeah,

Sure, the House flipped, but everyone was primed for the House to flip anyway. And so he didn't have to sort of like work against the narrative. But this time, I think sort of in the national psyche, in Republican voters' psyche, yeah, this is worse for Trump than 2018.

Interesting. Yeah, no, the point is, in all these key Senate races, you know, where his endorsed candidate won the nomination, you know, Democrats held onto the seats or and they even flipped Pennsylvania. And, you

To me, it's like Trump has come out of this just looking very bad. And the fact is we're seeing national polls that suggest that Ron DeSantis could have an edge on him already. And now, you know, it's early. We're you know, we'll see where things go. But I do think that my earlier thinking was, well, look, Trump is going to at the end of the day, it's like Republicans have a lot of of.

loyalty to Trump. They view him as a strong guy. A lot of them don't think he really lost in 2020, or at least not fairly. But as you said-

It is possible that the shine is really off of him now in a way that will make them turn to someone they think has a better chance of winning for Republicans. So I – we're a long way from knowing that for sure, but I do think that this midterm really actually hurt, actively hurt Trump.

I thought it was notable that neither Trump nor Biden felt the need to come to Georgia in the lead up to the runoff. And what that says about the standard bearers for both parties and whether they essentially are going to help and hurt down ballot candidates looking forward to 2024.

But in terms of, you know, Trump, I guess if Walker had won, would that have been, I don't know if that would have been seen as like a victory for Trump, even if it was just by like one or two points. And to that point, I don't know if Trump has publicly said anything about Walker's loss so far. And the fact that Walker conceded rather quickly, I thought was pretty surprising just given, you know, everything that happened with Trump in 2020. Yeah.

so trump did weigh in on true social simply saying in all caps our country is in big trouble what a mess so uh he has he does seem to have acknowledged implicitly that uh that walker has lost um on the subject of 2024 i mean look i agree with jeffrey that like trump emerges from the midterms in worse position than he was in before i'm just not sure that it is like a fatal blow to him um i think

electability is something that the out party prizes, but I also think it's something that is more important to Democrats than Republicans. We have seen over and over again, over the last decade, Republicans really prize ideological purity in their primaries. They prize somebody who will be a fighter for them. Um, they don't particularly care about, um, kind of appealing to the median voter Democrats do. Um, and they tend to go for more moderate candidates. Um,

Um, so I think that is true. I will be very interested Galen to see when, you know, once we get, start to get some of those polls in 2023 that we got in 2019 about like, what's the most important factor for you, electability or ideological purity or whatever, how that stacks up, how that compares to Democrats in 2020, how that compares to Republicans in, I guess, 2016, their last, um, open, uh, presidential primary. Um, but, but

But yeah, you know, I'm just not convinced that everyday Republican primary voters care about electability that much and therefore that it will hurt Trump with them. I do think it will hurt him among Republican elites. You've already seen a lot of them be like, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm over this, especially also in light of his recent statement about suspending the Constitution. A lot of Republicans were critical of that. So this could be another one of those inflection points kind of like after January 6th, where

There's an opportunity for the party elites to leave Trump behind. But of course, after January 6th, they ended up rallying back around him, I think in no small part because they saw that voters were still loyal to him. So I think that clearly could still happen. But I do think we are at a little bit of an interesting junction in the road. All right. And we are going to park the car at that junction for the time being.

To use your metaphor, Nathaniel, because that is it for today. So thank you, Alex, Nathaniel, and Jeff.

Thank you. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen. That's the kind of enthusiasm I like, Nathaniel. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast.538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon. Bye.