Tomorrow is election day. The Milton Coalition Voter page has been updated. Specifically, under the News Stories, Podcast, Interviews, Questionnaires section, many new links have been added to assist voters in making their decision in the HD-47 race. Following is a link to the Milton Coalition Voter Page:
A Competitive HD-47 Race
If you are a local political junkie, like me, I highly recommend the State Navigate (SN) website. SN mimics at the state level the highly regarded Cook Political Report, which analyzes and predicts national elections.
The State Navigate website has rated the HD-47 race as competitive; most races in Georgia are not competitive. Only 16 out of 180 house seats are currently rated as competitive. Still Miller is highly favored, with an 84% chance of winning. (Trump’s approval rating in HD-47 is 41.5%–slightly higher than his 39.3% nationwide approval rating.) However, Miller’s victory is not the lock it was expected to be, considering Miller’s huge advantages: a slew of political endorsements (including outgoing representative Jan Jones); many hundreds of thousands of dollars of PAC money; and a flood of large contributions from local politicians and special interests. Despite all these advantages, Miller has consistently underperformed. To be blunt, as someone who has closely watched his campaign, I believe he was run a poor campaign, with many missteps . . . surprising considering his long history as a political operative in various campaigns. After perusing State Navigator’s HD-47 predictions, I now understand why the state Republican party PAC is dumping so much money into the race. And I now understand why Miller’s surrogates have launched a very ugly smear campaign, often focused on the petty and personal . . . very much below-the-belt campaign tactics. Suffice to say, Miller’s Opie Taylor campaign image has been destroyed by his recent scorched earth campaign. My belief is the personal attacks will be ineffective at best and will backfire at worst . . . such tactics don’t play well in HD-47, where voters are much more educated, engaged and discerning. However, I suppose Miller perceived that victory might be slipping away from him and low-ball tactics were his only recourse. After all, winning is everything, right? That’s just politics, right? All’s fair in love and war and politics, right?
In previous elections, HD-47 was not competitive. Democrat challengers typically garnered only 37 – 38% of the vote. Additionally, as the blue zone has crept northward, HD-47 was re-districted in 2020 (by taking in part of very red Cherokee County) to keep the district in Republican hands.
Primary Forces Making HD-47 Competitive
Three forces are making the HD-47 race competitive:
First, Jan Jones is not on the ballot. Jones typically outperformed national and statewide Republican candidates in the district by 5 percentage points—a result of incumbency and a huge campaign war chest. So rather than starting with 37% of the vote, DeFranco probably starts with 42% of the vote.
Second, DeFranco is a much stronger candidate than previous Democrats that ran for the HD-47 seat. She is smart, engaging, hard-working, and media-savvy. However, her career in media has meant she also carries a lot of baggage in the form of stupid, sometimes offensive, social media utterances. Nevertheless, I think her candidate strength still nets out positive, perhaps adding another 2% to her vote totals.
Third, it is unfortunate, but state elections have become nationalized. This is especially true of the current election. And this trend should be helpful to DeFranco. Every state poll indicates that Democrats will gain seats in the Georgia House and possibly the State Senate. SN gives Democrats a 29% chance of actually winning a majority of seats in the Georgia House. Certainly, the Republican headwinds blowing from Washington DC will substantially hurt Republican candidates in statewide races . . . how much remains to be seen.
Split ticket voters will decide this election. Typically, Republican split ticket voters outnumber (by 3 to 1) Democrat split ticket voters. And the proportion of such voters is higher in District 47. Remember it was white, educated, suburban voters that put Biden in the White House in 2020 . . . a very high proportion of such voters live in HD-47 and a large majority of these voters were women. Add to all of this the Ossoff effect. It is a near certainty that Ossoff will win because of Republican split-ticket voters; he currently maintains a relatively high 20% approval rating among Republicans. Common sense suggests these voters, having voted for Ossoff, will be more inclined to vote down-ballot for other Democrats. All these factors militate in favor of DeFranco. So perhaps Republican headwinds will yield another 4% for DeFranco.
Three Areas Where DeFranco Has Underperformed . . . Possibly to Her Detriment
Of course, it is difficult to assess the above factors, particularly the second and third factors. I predict DeFranco will garner 48% of the vote . . . well within the (large) margin of error. We’ll see. As a strategist by trade, there are a three areas where DeFranco has fallen short and would explain her defeat–if it comes to pass.
First, despite her media savvy, De Franco’s messaging has been scattered and sometimes poor quality. Some of her posts have been on-the-mark and brilliant. But quite a few posts have been weird, wacky, and sometimes whiny. And I was baffled as to the relevance/purpose of some posts.
Second, DeFranco needed to run as a moderate to attract the split ticket voters that will decide the election. Jack Miller understands the criticality of these voters and his messaging (until he veered sharply negative) seemed aimed at these voters. His model-citizen, calm demeanor is reassuring; his messaging—although mostly vanilla—was designed not to offend . . . again, until he decided personal attacks were needed to win. DeFranco has touched on some themes (accountability and transparency) and issues (Flock cameras) that appeal to voters across the political spectrum, particularly split-ticket voters. She needed to do much more of this. And she needed to moderate her progressive stances on certain issues (healthcare, education, abortion). When you are running and serving a strongly red-leaning district, you need to acknowledge that and position yourself accordingly . . . that is, not too far to the left. Too often De Franco has been preaching to her base, who regardless (of her messaging) are going to show up and vote for her because of the Governor and US Senate races. (Frankly, as a political conservative, I must admit DeFranco’s strong progressivism makes me queasy and she’s done little to allay that queasiness.)
Third, DeFranco has not sufficiently exploited Miller’s vulnerabilities . . . and he has many, which is why he avoided a debate and limits appearances to carefully choreographed events with friendly audiences. DeFranco seemed not to fully appreciate Miller’s vulnerabilities, so her messaging about Miller was sometimes muddled and not especially compelling. She should have chased him especially hard on 1) the $300,000+ campaign on his behalf by the gambling industry, 2) the huge conflicts of interest associated with his employment by the mayor of Milton, and 3) the incredible volume of IOUs Miller has issued to PACs, special interests, and various politicians. To be blunt, DeFranco needed to better and more fully expose the lack of integrity permeating Miller’s campaign and the associated high potential for future corruption.
Anyway, that is more than I wanted to say about the election. I will not endorse a candidate or even imply how I’m voting: Miller, DeFranco, or just skip the HD-47 race on the ballot.
Tim
