Hooray! I was only partly wrong on Georgia

"Looking forward to" isn't the same as "winning", as Senate candidate Rep. Jack Kingston found out after his loss in the Georgia runoff yesterday. When the primary on May 20 proceeded to a runoff, many Georgia Republicans' favored candidates were forced out of the race. Excitement among those voters was lower as a result (it's a case of "KAREN FUCK YEAH" vs. "meh, Kingston I guess"), and turnout subsequently lowered--a common pattern in runoff elections that we saw in the last election to this Senate seat in 2008, when a whopping 1.6 million voters who voted in the hotly contested November election didn't vote in the December runoff.

Nevertheless, the departure of some strong runner-up candidates from the race meant that both David Perdue and Rep. Kingston were able to increase their vote totals. Rep. Kingston did much better than Perdue in this respect, closing the 30,000-vote deficit on May 20 to a less than 9,000 vote gap yesterday. In large part this was due to his dramatic improvement in the counties carried by Perdue in the May 20 primary. In Hall and Henry Counties, both suburbs on the edge of the Atlanta metro area, Rep. Kingston picked up more than 2,600 votes in the runoff compared to the primary. Perdue couldn't boast any equivalent improvement in the counties carried by Rep. Kingston on May 20. Just as a refresher (and so you can look at both maps next to each other), here's the May 20 primary again (red is Perdue, blue is Rep. Kingston, and green is Karen Handel):

2014 GOP Senate primary in Georgia by county and winner's share of vote.

And here's the runoff:

2014 GOP Senate primary runoff in Georgia by county and margin.

A couple things to note:

• The purple in the northwest on the runoff map is Dade County, which gave 537 votes each to Perdue and Rep. Kingston.
• The north-south divide is still present, and in fact even sharper than before. This was expected, since voters in the southeast, instead of having seven candidates to choose from, now only had the choice between David Perdue and the guy who represented them in the House.

The most important thing, however, is the two scenarios presented in the last post on Georgia. In it I wrote that Sec. Handel's third-place finish and subsequent endorsement of Rep. Kingston could mean either of the following: 1) Sec. Handel spoiled Kingston voters in the north (explaining his weak performance there), so they would be more likely to vote for him in the runoff, or 2) in the counties she won (notably Gwinett and Fulton) Perdue came in second, so it's likely that her voter base has more in common with Perdue's and would therefore be more likely to vote Perdue in the runoff.

In that post, only hours before the polls closed, I concluded that scenario #1 was more likely because it accorded better with the story the polls told. Turns out that, despite my rating the race as "leaning Kingston", I was right about that scenario. Compared to Perdue, Rep. Kingston picked up a lot more votes in the counties that originally voted for Sec. Handel:

It's how Rep. Kingston was able to curb his losses in the Atlanta area, where Sec. Handel performed most strongly. Combined with his improvements in Perdue territory, that really should have been enough to give him a win in the runoff.

Except, of course, it wasn't. And the table above shows, in blindingly obvious detail, why it wasn't. Rep. Kingston picked up votes all across the state--except, ironically, in his core in the southeast. In his own 1st congressional district alone Rep. Kingston bled over 5,000 votes from May to July. Most handicappers see punditry about how "it's all about turnout" as something of an inside joke, but the Kingston campaign must be hitting itself right now because if those 14,000 Kingston voters had turned out to vote in the runoff, Rep. Kingston would be the one running attack ads against Michelle Nunn for the next three months.

Despite this race having defied polling (as did Misissippi a month ago), it may be that Georgia Republicans chose the slightly stronger candidate. While Rep. Kingston consistently led Perdue in polls for the runoff, in head-to-head matchups Perdue performed slightly better against Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn. And for the time being, the Senate race in Georgia retains its TOSS-UP status as it heads toward November.