How Donald Trump is helping Raphael Warnock in Georgia

December 04, 2022 at 16:03

Brian Kemp cruised to reelection, while his preferred Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, was forced into a runoff with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
To understand the Trump impact on Georgia, take a look at the CNN/SSRS poll of the Senate runoff released on Friday.
The former football star led Warnock by 87 points among voters who didn’t have a favorable view of Biden but had a favorable opinion of Trump.
A sizable 21% of likely Georgia voters had a favorable view of neither Biden nor Trump.
If Walker was winning those who didn’t like Biden or Trump by 50 points, he’d be leading in our Georgia poll.
Not surprisingly, Walker leads among White voters and Warnock with Black voters.
But what might have floored a political analyst a mere eight years ago is the extent of the educational divide among White voters in Georgia.
His lead shrunk to 51% to 47% among White voters with a college degree.
Indeed, arguably the biggest reason Democrats are now competitive in Georgia elections is how much more Democratic college-educated White voters have become.
The way Trump built coalitions (i.e., relying on non-college-educated White voters at the expense of college-educated White voters) is a large part of that.
Unlike in most states, though, there wasn’t a lot of ground Republicans could gain among non-college-educated White voters in Georgia.
There was a ton of ground, however, that the GOP could lose among White voters with a college degree.
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