Georgia is a great “multi-word-score” state for Dem donors in 2022. There are key elections this year for Secretary of State (Jen Jordan!), state legislature, and U.S. Senate (Raphael Warnock!), in addition to the U.S. House. That means supporting Dem voter turnout at any of these levels is likely to have trickle-down and trickle-up effects — which means more bang for our donation buck!
With that in mind, we recently applied our election model to Georgia to see which U.S House races are the most important for Dems to support. As in many states, redistricting has reduced the number of competitive districts, but the TL;DR is that we found three GA House districts worth of Dem donors’ support.
This post summarizes the results of our analysis; full details are in a post on our Github site. But before we get to the data, two quick points:
Quick interlude #1 — reminder of our methods: (Feel free to skip this if you’re familiar with our prior work.) We’ve developed and refined a demographic model to project the intrinsic Democratic lean in each new district based on its makeup in terms of race, sex, education, and population density. When we put those demographics together with what we know about partisan lean and turnout, we think our model gives a more realistic forward-looking view than the “historical model” (which looks at past voting history) of what Dem donors could conceivably achieve if we’re smart about where to deploy our resources and energy. More details are in the GitHub post and links therein.
Quick interlude #2 — plug for our prior analyses: Check out our other analyses of upcoming U.S. House and state legislature contests, including recommendations in NC, TX, GA, and more, by following this link to posts tagged ‘2022’. We’ll be updating them with ActBlue links as they’re available!
And now, back to our GA analysis: Here’s a summary of the 3 Georgia districts we think are highest-priority Dem donation opportunities:
GA-2: Republicans have this long-time Dem seat in their sights, with a half dozen facing off in the upcoming primary. We agree with pundits that incumbent Sanford Bishop Jr. is facing a tight race, and our model actually suggests he needs even more help from Dem donors than advertised.
GA-6: Lucy McBath abandoned the seat she’s held since 2018 to run against fellow Dem incumbent Carolyn Bourdeaux in the 7th, which is more Blue-friendly under redistricting. But although historical results suggest the GOP is strongly positioned in the newly-drawn 6th, our analysis suggests the demographic winds are blowing Dems’ way. (This is reminiscent of the old 7th district, which was reliably Republican for years until Bourdeaux, recognizing that the population had shifted in Dems’ favor, came within 550 votes of winning in 2018, and completed the mission in 2020.) In the wake of McBath’s exit, political newcomer Bob Christian will represent Dems against Rich McCormick (who narrowly lost to Bourdeaux in GA-7 in 2022). Contrary to most analysts, we think this district is leaning in our direction, and Dem donations this year could help us either hold the seat in ‘22 or lay the groundwork to flip it back to the blue column in ‘24.
GA-11: Republican Barry Loudermilk has held this reliably red district since 2014, but our model suggests the underlying demographics are somewhat more balanced than historical results would suggest. His Dem opponent, political newcomer Antonio Daza-Fernandez, is an openly gay Latino immigrant who runs a ballroom dance studio. He hasn’t gotten much traction or media coverage yet, but any headway he can make in November would help move the seat blue-ward for 2024 and beyond.
| DISTRICT | OUR MODEL | HISTORICAL MODEL | NOTES/ANALYSIS |
| GA-2 | 51% Dem | 54% Dem | Appears more vulnerable than advertised for Dem incumbent. |
| GA-6 | 52% Dem | 38% Dem | Open seat seems much more winnable by Dems than history would suggest. |
| GA-11 | 48% Dem | 39% Dem | Rated safe for Republican incumbent, but appears to be moving toward Dems. |
We made a handy ActBlue link for the candidates who are already identified, and will updated it after the primaries. But no need to wait — click the button and help win House races in Georgia for Team Blue!
Also, please read our full Georgia analysis here — it’s full of cool data, charts, and commentary, as well as more details on our methods.
And finally, stay in touch by signing up for our email updates (see below) … we have more state analyses in the pipeline for you!