Our first state legislature analysis for 2020 focuses on Georgia. The Peach State’s House and Senate currently tilt red, but by our analysis, Dems can flip both chambers blue this November. In this post, we’ll tell you:
Why Dems nationwide should care about the GA legislature
Current status of the GA legislature
2020 prospects for Dems
Key GA legislature races for Dems in 2020
How you can help turn GA blue RIGHT NOW
Why Dems nationwide should care about the GA legislature
Regardless of where you live, you should support Dem GA legislature candidates in 2020. Here’s why:
Redistricting: In Georgia, lawmakers have broad power to redraw district lines after the 2020 census — so this election is the last chance to combat Republican gerrymandering.
Issues: Georgia’s Republican-led legislature is a major threat to abortion rights and gun control.
“Trickle-up”: Georgia voters will elect two US Senators and vote in two of the most competitive US House races in the country. Supporting state legislature candidates helps up-ballot Dems by putting more boots on the ground for GOTV efforts. (See our prior post on this topic here.)
Building for the future: GA is poised to be a battleground state in the Presidential election — possibly in 2020, and almost certainly within a decade. By supporting Dems there now, we’re laying the groundwork to flip its Electoral College votes. (See here for our prior research related to this.)
Current status of the GA legislature
Both chambers of the GA legislature have 2-year terms, so all seats are on the ballot in November. Here’s the current skinny, via Ballotpedia.
GA Senate — 56 seats: 35 Republican, 21 Democratic.
GA House: 180 seats: 105 Republican, 75 Democratic.
It may look like a super-human lift to flip these chambers from red to blue in 2020 — but we think it’s actually quite feasible! Read on to learn why.
2020 prospects for Dems (1) — GA Senate
We analyzed the current field of candidates in each House and Senate district via the GA Secretary of State office, and the results of the 2018 election in GA via openelections.net. (For our fellow data geeks, we’ve described some additional methods at the bottom of this post, and also deposited our complete data sets on our Github page, in easy-to-read CSV format — check ‘em out!)
We rank the 2020 prospects in each district based on Dems’ vote share in the 2018 Governor’s race between Stacey Abrams (D) and Brian Kemp (R). We call a race “likely” for Dems in 2020 if Abrams won 60% or more of the vote, “winnable Dem” if she won 45-59%, and “longer shot Dem” if she won 40-44%. We call districts in which Kemp won more than 60% of the vote “likely R”. On the red side, 13 seats are unchallenged by Dems, and another 13 are likely R. Here’s the tally for the remaining 30 seats:
Definite D (no R challenger): 14
Likely D: 4
Winnable D: 7
Longer shot D: 5
Bottom line — in order to flip the GA Senate blue, Dems need to win 11 of the 12 “winnable D” and “longer shot D” races (in addition to holding the “likely D” spots). That’s hard, but not impossible if we strongly support Team Blue in these 12 races!
Before we move on to the House, two quick notes about our methods, which are intentionally inclusive in terms of our final recommendations:
If you’re optimistic about Dems’ mobilization and turnout efforts in November, you might think that the districts where Abrams won 59% of the votes are “likely D” in 2020, and don’t need our support. But we think Republicans will think those districts are in play, and target them particularly hard in November — so it’s important for Team Blue to strongly defend them. That’s why we lump them in with other “winnable” races.
On the other end of the spectrum, many professional election prognosticators would probably discount Dems’ chances in our “longer shot D” races. But our analysis isn’t about predicting who will win — it’s about finding races where we can win, if we put our money and effort to work. We think changing demographics and a high likelihood of another “blue wave” driven by anti-Trump sentiment gives us a shot in districts that only went 40% for Abrams in 2018 — provided we all do our part to help.
(Also — just to reiterate, you can get our full data sets on our Github page.)
2020 prospects for Dems (2) — GA House
In the GA House, Republicans are unchallenged in 36 districts, and likely to win another 45, for a total of 81. Here’s the breakdown of the remaining 99 seats:
Definite D (no R challenger): 54
Likely D: 8
Winnable D: 29
Longer shot D: 8
Compared with the Senate, the situation in the House is more favorable for Dems. To get a majority, we need to win 29 of the 37 seats we call “winnable D” or “longer shot D”, in addition to holding all 8 “likely D” seats.
Key GA legislature races for Dems in 2020
Combining the analyses above, we identified 49 key races for Dems in the GA legislature in November: 37 in the House, and 12 in the Senate. We’ve listed all of them at the bottom of this post, along with more details on our methods and a few other pieces of data we think are important.
Two important observations:
Of these 49 races, 38 only have a single Dem in the race. We’re going to follow the other 11 races through the primaries and runoffs, and update our analysis with specific names once they’re determined.
For those of you particularly interested in the US House, 38 of the 49 high-priority districts that we identified overlap with GA-6 and/or GA-7. (23 of these have single Dem candidates; the rest have primaries pending.) That means that when you support these races, you won’t just be helping flip the GA legislature blue — you’ll also be supporting “trickle up” efforts in two of the tightest US House races in the country!
How you can help turn GA blue RIGHT NOW
Here are a few things you can do to help Democrats in the GA legislature and “up-ballot” races:
Donate to key races: We’ve set up a consolidated ActBlue page for Dem candidates in the GA legislature that we identified above. Just click the green button above! A few important notes:
All ActBlue donations go directly to candidates. Blue Ripple is a not-for-profit, self-funded “labor of love” — we don’t take a penny.
Current GA state legislators are prohibited from active fundraising during the congressional session, which ends sometime after March 27 (details TBD; session currently suspended due to coronavirus). So, we’ll add incumbents’ names to the ActBlue slate after the session is over.
In some districts (“TBD” in our table), multiple Dems are running in the primaries on May 19 — we’ll update these here and on the ActBlue slate after we know who’s running in the general.
Some candidates (marked with a ^ in our table) aren’t fundraising on ActBlue — please consider donating to their campaigns directly via their websites.
We have not yet vetted individual candidates in the state legislature races. Our analysis so far is a pure “numbers game” analysis of how to win Dem majorities in the GA House and Senate. It’s possible that you may not be 100% aligned with some of these candidates’ positions on some specific issues. If this is a concern to you, please do your own diligence.
Donate to other worthy causes in GA: VoteRiders maintains a huge list of GOTV organizations in GA — check it out. Fair Fight is Stacey Abrams’s new organization working for fair voting in GA. The Georgia NAACP does great work on behalf of the state’s voters.
Donate your time and effort to enabling the Blue Wave in GA: Mobilize America, Vote Forward, and VoteWithMe all have opportunities to do phone banking and letter writing to support GOTV across the country. Sister District is also helping folks nationwide support GA legislature candidates in 2020.
Support GA news outlets: Local journalism is in trouble across the country — which is terrible for our democracy. We took out a subscription to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to support their reporters’ efforts to keep us informed about down-ballot races. Please join us.
Stay tuned for more Blue Ripple updates: We’re going to do more analyses of the GA legislature as the races evolve. We’ll also cover other state-level races in a similar manner. So, if you got this from a friend, please sign up to get our posts via email, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, stay in touch, and help spread the word!
Coda: Our full list of high-priority races for Dems in the GA legislature
Quick notes:
We used openelections.net to determine the percentage of each district that voted Dem in the 2018 Governor’s race, and also the fraction that’s in GA-6 and/or GA-7 (i.e., the fraction of US House ballots from that district in 2018 that were cast for candidates in GA-6 or GA-7). Openelections.net data are at the level of individual polling places (precincts), which we aggregated into state and US districts based on the candidates who received votes. For data aficionados, the code for that aggregation is available on our GitHub page.
In the candidate column, “TBD” indicates two or more Dems are running in the primary on May 19. (There’s also a runoff on July 21 if needed.)
^ indicates candidates who are not listed on ActBlue. Please visit the campaigns’ websites to donate directly to these folks.
Please email us if you have questions about (or find errors in) this table or our full data sets.
| DISTRICT | STATUS | %D IN 2018 | % in GA-6/7 | CANDIDATE |
| HD-34 | R incumbent | 44% | 0% | Priscilla G. Smith^ |
| HD-35 | R incumbent | 49% | 0% | TBD |
| HD-37 | D incumbent | 54% | 29% | Mary Frances Williams |
| HD-43 | R incumbent | 51% | 78% | Luisa Wakeman |
| HD-44 | R incumbent | 46% | 72% | Connie DiCicco^ |
| HD-45 | R incumbent | 45% | 100% | Sara Tindall Ghazal |
| HD-47 | R incumbent | 41% | 100% | Anthia Owens Carter |
| HD-48 | D incumbent | 50% | 100% | Mary Robichaux |
| HD-49 | R incumbent | 49% | 100% | TBD |
| HD-50 | D incumbent | 52% | 100% | Angelika Kausche |
| HD-51 | D incumbent | 52% | 100% | Josh McLaurin |
| HD-52 | R incumbent | 54% | 59% | Shea Roberts |
| HD-54 | D incumbent | 57% | 0% | Betsy Holland |
| HD-73 | R incumbent | 42% | 0% | William Harris |
| HD-79 | D incumbent | 56% | 100% | Michael Wilensky |
| HD-80 | D incumbent | 58% | 92% | Matthew Wilson |
| HD-95 | D incumbent | 54% | 100% | Beth Moore |
| HD-97 | R incumbent | 47% | 100% | Mary Blackmon Campbell |
| HD-98 | R incumbent | 40% | 100% | Taeho Cho^ |
| HD-102 | D incumbent | 52% | 100% | Gregg Kennard |
| HD-104 | R incumbent | 46% | 18% | TBD |
| HD-105 | D incumbent | 46% | 71% | Donna McLeod |
| HD-106 | R incumbent | 56% | 38% | TBD |
| HD-107 | D incumbent | 59% | 100% | Shelly Hutchinson |
| HD-108 | D incumbent | 52% | 30% | Jasmine Clark |
| HD-109 | R incumbent | 49% | 0% | Regina Lewis-Ward |
| HD-110 | open (currently R) | 44% | 0% | Ebony Carter |
| HD-117 | R incumbent | 47% | 0% | Mokah Jasmine Johnson |
| HD-119 | R incumbent | 46% | 0% | Jonathan Wallace |
| HD-132 | D incumbent | 49% | 0% | TBD |
| HD-138 | R incumbent | 44% | 0% | Marc Arnett |
| HD-145 | R incumbent | 45% | 0% | TBD |
| HD-147 | R incumbent | 50% | 0% | Stephen Baughier^ |
| HD-151 | R incumbent | 52% | 0% | Joyce Barlow |
| HD-164 | R incumbent | 48% | 0% | TBD |
| HD-173 | R incumbent | 41% | 0% | Booker T. Gainor^ |
| HD-179 | R incumbent | 40% | 0% | Julie Jordan |
| SD-1 | R incumbent | 40% | 0% | Kerri Wilkins McGinty^ |
| SD-6 | D incumbent | 59% | 16% | Jen Jordan |
| SD-9 | R incumbent | 49% | 58% | TBD |
| SD-17 | R incumbent | 46% | 0% | Kelly Rose |
| SD-23 | open (currently R) | 40% | 0% | Ceretta Smith |
| SD-32 | R incumbent | 45% | 95% | Christine Triebsch^ |
| SD-37 | R incumbent | 43% | 0% | TBD |
| SD-40 | D incumbent | 58% | 100% | Sally Harrell |
| SD-45 | open (currently R) | 43% | 82% | TBD |
| SD-46 | R incumbent | 46% | 0% | Zachary Perry |
| SD-48 | open (currently D) | 56% | 100% | TBD |
| SD-56 | R incumbent | 50% | 95% | Sarah Beeson |
Art via Markus Spiske (Pexels).