Although the polls are tightening, Nathan Deal and David Perdue still hold relatively small but stubborn leads over their respective Democratic challengers, Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn.
But in the words of that old Curtis Mayfield song, “People get ready, there’s a train a-coming.” It may not arrive this year, but you can hear it rumbling toward us.
Take a look at three polls released this week in the Perdue-Nunn race:
• SurveyUSA puts Perdue up by 1 percentage point, but according to its data, he’s in that position because he enjoys a 19-point advantage — 57 percent to 38 percent — among Georgians ages 65 and older.
• YouGov reports Perdue enjoys a four-point lead, but only because of a 28-point margin — 61 percent to 33 percent — among likely voters 65 and older.
• PPP finds Perdue in the lead by two points, but again, that’s due to overwhelming support among older Georgians. Those 65 and older give him a 25-point margin, 59-34 percent.
In the short term, it’s reassuring to have your voting strength among older voters. You can count on them to turn out, especially in a year with no presidential race on the ballot. However, there’s no getting around the actuarial tables, and those tables say that’s a strategy with returns that diminish over time.
And then there’s the matter of race. It may not be pretty, and most Georgians regardless of party might wish it were otherwise, but race is nonetheless a rough but effective proxy for party loyalty in Georgia. As a rule, 90 percent of black Georgians vote Democratic, while roughly three of four white Georgians vote Republican. Those numbers have remained depressingly steady for a long time now.
However, the racial composition of the underlying electorate is changing pretty quickly. The percentage of white, Republican-leaning voters has been dropping by four or five percentage points over each four-year presidential cycle, and that transition could be accelerating.
Nate Cohn, who writes a data-analysis column for The New York Times, pointed out on Twitter this week that since November of 2013, 210,000 new voters have registered in Georgia. That in itself is a big number. Of that group, 84,582 identify themselves as white, while 125,446 identify themselves by some other description. At a pace like that — 40 percent white, 60 percent nonwhite — it doesn’t take long to create a new electorate.
As Cohn concludes, “No other plausibly competitive state has seen a more favorable shift for Democrats in the racial composition of eligible voters over the last decade.”
It’s important to note that this ongoing transformation is not going to turn Georgia into a consistently Democratic state and certainly not a liberal state. It is making Georgia a competitive state for moderate Democrats along the lines of Nunn, Carter, possibly Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and perhaps Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race.
Just as important, fear of that approaching train should make Georgia Republicans shy away from the wilder-eyed policies that are causing problems for their ideological counterparts in Kansas, North Carolina and elsewhere. Their margin of comfort, once substantial, is now close to nil.
