sombear said:
Exactly. Trump poisoned the GOP well in 2020. Turnout numbers were way down thanks to Trump splitting the party, attacking Kemp and the state GOP, and flat discouraging folks from voting.
This is not to say that GA is an overwhelmingly red state. It is not. But it should be more like NC - GOP consistently winning by narrow margins with the occasional Dem moderate win. Kemp's election, congressional, and local races (and general polling) demonstrate this. As I posted before the election and again this week, an "unnamed/hypothetical" Republican polled better than HW. An average candidate would have beat Warnock. In the first election, over 200,000 Republicans voted Republican except for Walker, and the margin was Warnock by around 37,000.
HW was the only GOP statewide candidate to lose.
GOP by far got more total votes in combined congressional, state senate, and state house races.
Every GA state/fed candidate that Trump explicitly endorsed lost their primary, except two. Of those two, one lost in the general (HW), the other (B Jones) won but underperformed every other statewide GOP candidate except HW.
Part in bold supports my comment above about party infighting in GA. The party establishment is more worried about being "too conservative" than about getting conservatives elected. Spent several hours over a few nights around a campfire with a significant GA donor. Good dude. Kemp fan. And like the majority of GOP donors, quite verkrampte toward the ideological side of politics. Common problem with Republican businessmen. They are far more concerned with "good governance" than conservatism, and are more correctly understood as "not liberals" than "conservatives." that in & of itself wouldn't be so much of a problem were the "not liberal" donor more tolerant of movement conservatives. As a rule, they are not. Ergo the problem.
Example of problems in GA GOP: Perdue (an incumbent) got more votes than Ossof in the general election, but lost the runoff. Runoff elections are supposed to favor the party with the most registrations and/or the best ground (turnout) operation. Normally, the party with the most registrations also has the best ground operation. In GA, that is
clearly not the case. Dems have a superior GOTV machine that transforms a red state at the county level to a Purple state in a statewide election. THAT is on Kemp. THAT is on the GA GOP. GOP moderates do not want to let GOP conservatives gain control over the party. Exhibit A, as has been noted by others, is Kemp's selection of Loffler, a non-native to GA, to freeze out Collins, from the conservative wing of the party and who led the House defense of Trump during impeachment.
Not trying to lay everything on Kemp. Insisting on balance. There are a lot of reasons why GA has two Senators and Trump is not exactly the lion's share of it. There is no excuse whatsoever for a Republican losing a runoff in GA. It should be a layup for the party with the most registrations and best ground-game. GA GOP is being very poorly led.