A Focus on Competent Leadership

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Leading up to the 2022 general election in Georgia, the rest of the nation had closely followed our politics for two full years. It began, of course, with the madness that followed our 2020 presidential election, featuring the smallest percentage margin of victory – 0.2% – in the country. Then President Trump’s massive efforts to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, which still echoes through the legal system, overlaid two U.S. Senate runoffs that would determine control of the body for the next term.

We followed that up with high drama in races for our state constitutional offices, with Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr handily turning back Trump-backed primary challenges, and then Kemp trouncing Stacey Abrams, a celebrity candidate for national Democrats and the media, to win re-election.

The Georgia File noted after that election that a highly desired Great Quiet would descend upon the state’s voters for the next year. It did, though our local news remains filled with news of the Fulton County case against Trump and his supporters. Exhausted, Georgians have largely tuned out.

This month, however, marks the end of our Great Quiet. We return to the polls for Georgia’s presidential preference primary, even if the nominations are already effectively determined. Candidates for Congress and the General Assembly will qualify to run for office, and many will have already been campaigning for some time for the May primaries. The General Assembly will barrel toward its conclusion for the year, with legislators anxious to finish the session to turn their attention to their own re-elections. Down-ballot candidates will face the difficult task of trying to get their individual messages out to voters inundated day and night by the presidential campaigns.

In 2020, neither the Biden nor Trump campaigns prioritized Georgia as an important swing state – a shocking miscalculation, given the 1.4% margin in the 2018 governor’s race. Neither side will make the same mistake again. The campaigns, the national parties and outside political groups will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in Georgia from now until November. That’s limitless texts and calls, knocks on your door, mail pieces and so many TV ads that it’ll ruin our summer pastime of watching the Braves.

That spending will attempt to influence about 100,000 voters out of roughly 7 million, presumably focused on the “Kemp-Warnock voters.”

At the beginning of the year, some polls showed Trump leading in Georgia by a relatively wide margin for a purple state, but we can expect to see the race tighten significantly as traditional Democratic voters who aren’t thrilled with President Biden “come home” as the election nears.

Down-ballot candidates will face the difficult task of trying to get their individual messages out to voters inundated day and night by the presidential campaigns.

With the top of the ticket so often determining the fate of races down ballot, Georgia voters should follow the lead of the Kemp-Warnock voters when it comes to elections on the state level. We know those split-ticket voters didn’t vote solely on ideology because on the same ballot they supported both a very conservative Republican and a very liberal Democrat. Some Kemp-Warnock voters were independents, but many were Democrats who approved of Kemp’s record on standing up to Trump and opening the economy during COVID or Republicans who thought Warnock’s GOP opponent wasn’t qualified for the job.

Georgians, like all Americans, think Washington is hopelessly broken. With little hope that this election can fix that problem, they can go to their partisan corners. But while Georgians think the nation is going in the wrong direction, they have a much sunnier view of how things are going here.

At a time when Americans are fleeing some of the high-tax, high-regulation, high-cost blue states, Georgians should recognize that we benefit from not just good fortune but good governance. Our state’s Republican leadership has kept us No. 1 for business, delivered record-breaking economic development wins, fully funded public schools, invested in infrastructure and increased police pay, all while cutting income taxes.

The Kemp-Warnock voters blazed a trail of putting aside differences on social issues and focusing on competent and visionary leadership. Georgians might go their separate ways on what “change” they hope to see in Washington, but a majority should coalesce to support continuity of leadership in state government.

We don’t need hundreds of millions of dollars in ads to tell us we have a good thing.

Brian Robinson is co-host of WABE’s Political Breakfast podcast.