What the Georgia Primary Tells Us About November and 2024
.@LeaderMcConnell on GA voter turnout: “Shame on the Democrats who pushed the Big Lie that a grand scheme was afoot to prevent millions of Americans from voting. It was never true. […] The fake hysteria was just a pretext to push a sweeping national takeover of election laws.” pic.twitter.com/oBpidMdtfN
— The Hill (@thehill) May 25, 2022
BUCK: Even Mitch McConnell gets it when it comes to Georgia, friends, because the numbers are speaking loud and clear on this one. Record turnout in the primary in Georgia yesterday. As we know we had — by the way, Clay is become with us; so look at this, I thought you threw the smoke bomb, you’re back already?
CLAY: The kids got let out of school, Buck, early. It’s the final day of school for my kids. And the moment I got there they were already coming out, hopped in the car, took me like four minutes to pick ’em up. Unprecedented speed. So, yes, I’m back.
If you hear kids screaming in the Travis household, they’re probably screams of joy because school is officially out in their department. And for the next couple of months they’re gonna be playing a lot of video games. Let’s be honest here.
BUCK: So here’s where we are in Georgia, just to put us all on the same page here. Who won, who lost, and what happens now, and what does this tell us about the future and the midterm election specifically? So Kemp won, the sitting governor defeated a primary challenge and won by a lot. I think it was like 70 — give or take 70-20 situation. Herschel Walker cruised to, you know, high stepping into the end zone, if you will.
CLAY: Yes, good analogy, yes.
BUCK: Thank you. I learn the sports —
CLAY: Stiff arm the competition. Yes.
BUCK: So Herschel Walker is the GOP nominee up against Raphael Warnock. That is gonna be a Senate throwdown. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one shakes out. Obviously I’m telling you hoping Herschel wins that one. You have a particular stake.
CLAY: I do think he’s gonna win but, Buck, you can gamble on politics — you know I like to gamble on sports. But you can gamble on politics outside of the United States, not technically legal in the United States.
But Herschel is minus 275 which is a pretty substantial favorite to beat Warnock. And Kemp is minus 400 to beat Stacey Abrams. That means you’d have to bet, you know, $400 to win a hundred dollars. He’s a prohibitive favorite on both sides there. I just think that’s interesting. For people who were actually putting their money down on what they anticipate happening in Georgia.
BUCK: By the way, you know, Clay, I mentioned this before. I just wanted to give the stats again.
This is from our friend Ryan Girdusky. He’s a political analyst and a friend of the show. He put this out. Georgia GOP primary turnout, 2006, 419,000. 2010, 680,000. 2014, 596,000. 2018, 608,000. 2022, 1.1 million.
Georgia GOP primary turnout by year:
2006 – 419,254
2010 – 680,499
2014 – 596,218
2018 – 608,380
2022 – 1,109,506— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) May 25, 2022
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: All right? So people are fired up in Georgia. GOP voters are fired up in Georgia.
Raffensperger won, the secretary of state, and he is somebody people know probably mostly because of — at the national level, I should say, outside the state of Georgia ’cause he had some — a little bit of a kerfuffle with Trump, was a little bit of a back-and-forth with Trump over the situation in Georgia, the election results, et cetera. So Raffensperger did win.
They have an open primary in Georgia, so there was some percentage of formerly registered Democrats who voted for Raffensperger. It was pretty substantial, from what I saw. I think it was 7% of his vote came from formerly registered the Democrats, whatever that means. Am I missing any bigs ones?-Oh, there was of course. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: Marjorie Taylor Greene, she won her primary. We had her on the show to talk about the lawsuit —
CLAY: Ridiculous.
BUCK: — which was absurd and all that. But, Clay, here’s my biggest take-away from just last night. I want to hear what yours is. Clay and I haven’t even been able to chat about this one ’cause we’ve been talking about the other things going on.
I think that this is an indicator of people are really unhappy with Biden and Republicans are — I think they’re the most fired up in my adult lifetime to cast votes in favor of candidates who will stand with freedom, the Constitution, and against the insanity. It’s not a done deal yet. I think that’s what Georgia is showing us right now.
CLAY: I think it’s well said. And, by the way, total primary turnout up 63% over 2018. It almost passed the 2020 primaries, which were obviously a presidential election year, when everybody was super fired up to get their votes in to pick a Democrat nominee back in 2020.
So we’ve got at OutKick, Buck, official request for comment into Major League Baseball because they tried to brand this as Jim Crow 2.0. I think Major League Baseball should have to apologize to the state of Georgia. I think there are a lot of corporations, certainly Joe Biden’s not gonna do it, but we’re gonna hold them accountable at OutKick ’cause I’m still outraged over the decision to pull the All-Star Game out of Atlanta based on a lie, what is we now know a lie.
I had two big take-aways from this. One is, Buck, to your point, Stacey Abrams and Joe Biden are a bigger story now than Donald Trump is. So if you look at the results with Brian Kemp and you look at the results in that race where he won by 70-20%, something like that, people in Georgia overwhelmingly are saying, we want Stacey Abrams beaten, and we think Brian Kemp has the best option to do it.
So this is now a referendum, the midterms, as they should be, are not a referendum on 2020, they are a referendum on what’s going on with Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams is a candidate.
Second takeaway, Buck. I think Donald Trump has to be very careful in understanding that if he is going to run in 2024, it has to be a forward-looking campaign from his perspective, not backward.
Let me explain what I mean by that. The voters are telling us quite clearly that they are unhappy with Joe Biden. If Donald Trump is running in 2024, the only backwards look he needs to be giving is towards Joe Biden and talking about what a bad job he’s gonna do.
I’ll use a sports analogy. You can’t relitigate 2020 as a part of the 2024 campaign. You especially if you get to run against Joe Biden again, can argue that people made the wrong choice and here’s why they need to pick you going forward. My concern is Trump is gonna try to drag everybody back into 2020.
We don’t need to relitigate 2020. I think the Republicans got screwed. I think Donald Trump got screwed. I think Democrats used covid to rig the election. I think Big Tech rigged the election. I think all that happened.
But I’ll use the sports analogy here, Buck, ’cause Georgia’s a big sports state and they’re coming off a Braves championship and the Georgia Bulldogs championship. Sometimes you lose a game, because there’s a bad call made or because the rules are designed incorrectly. You can’t continue to talk about the game that you’ve lost. You have to talk about find a way to win going forward.
And to me what Georgia voters were saying is, we’re way more concerned about the future now than we are about relitigating the past. And I think if Trump is smart, he will take a lesson from this and start to focus on the things that he would bring if he runs in 2024 for the four years more he’d be president instead of arguing about 2020. That’s my big takeaway.
BUCK: I would add just two things to it. One is, the mentality should be we have to win by so much that their cheating doesn’t matter.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I want to hear, if Trump is running again, I think he is or whatever the case may be, I want the president saying we’re gonna win by so much that the cheating isn’t gonna matter, comma, also, we’re gonna do he give we can before the votes are cast to make sure, to your point, that they aren’t pulling nonsense and shenanigans which is what they did during the covid year.
Pennsylvania is a perfect example of this. Pennsylvania State constitution explicitly did not allow some of the voting changes that were made to expand — it’s as clear as day. And what I was having to say to people at the time after that election, after the 2020 election was, guys, I hear you, you’re right, we’re right, there’s a problem in Pennsylvania with this. No judge is going to say, “Well, that shouldn’t have been the rules that people voted under, therefore, I’m going to throw out these votes.” Now, that can make people very angry, and I get it, but that was the reality. No judge was going to say, well,you know, the hundred thousand votes or the 50,000 votes or whatever it is that came in later than what would have been allowed with the rule change.
The Trump campaign got caught flat-footed on the preemptive action against the — look, the way the Democrats to want cheat. Look. My attitude is, they always cheat. It’s a question of how much.
CLAY: I just — I think you’re a hundred percent right. Buck, we gotta win Wisconsin, we gotta win Pennsylvania, we gotta win Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, New Mexico I think is in play.
BUCK: Look at you with Minnesota and New Mexico. Getting aggressive.
CLAY: I think Nevada is gonna be in play if I can ever learn how to pronounce the state name correctly —
BUCK: “Nevada.”
CLAY: — people in the state are happy. Arizona certainly, Georgia, all of those states, right, I don’t want to win by a pinprick. And let’s be honest. Trump won in 2016 by a small margin, right? You change a hundred thousand votes, Hillary’s elected, you change, you know, 40,000 votes in 2020, we flip the election both ways.
Trump — or whoever the nominee is gonna be in 2024 ’cause I think there’s gonna be a robust primary debate about who the best Republican standard-bearer is — it needs to be a campaign that’s not trying to win in the margins. It needs to be a campaign that kicks ass.
BUCK: I think you could have with the right GOP candidate — ’cause you and I both know, there’s not gonna be some great turnaround Evert from this the Biden administration. Even they know the disaster, this is a mess, it’s gonna go down in history as one of the least effective, worst presidencies in living memory certainly maybe going back, you know, a hundred years. And look. I think the GOP right now, right now, a lot of things can change, right now is on track to get more than half of the Latino vote.
CLAY: Yep.
BUCK: And maybe double their share of the African-American vote, which would be fantastic.
CLAY: It would destroy the Democrat as it exists today if that happened.
BUCK: So we’ll have to see. We’ll continue to push for this, folks.
