Cook Report Moves Georgia Governor Race to ‘Lean Republican’

Cook Report Moves Georgia Governor Race to ‘Lean Republican’

Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is facing off against Stacey Abrams in November.

Again.

The Cook Political Report had the race as a toss-up. Abrams is all over the place. The MSM fawns over her, the left seems to thang onto every word she says. She’s pulling in money.

No one talks about Kemp. If they do, it’s to criticize him.

But with only three-and-a-half months left, the race now leans Republican.

Kemp held off challenger David Perdue, who had President Donald Trump’s support. Trump could not stand that Kemp wouldn’t overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results

Kemp won the primary by over 50 points. Geez. That alone says something about Georgia voters.

But Jessica Taylor at The Cook Political Report said the primary win didn’t change the organization’s mind:

A bipartisan survey for the AARP conducted July 5-11 by the GOP firm Fabrizio, Lee & Associates (which was Trump’s 2020 pollster) and Democratic firm Impact Research (which polled for Biden) showed Kemp leading Abrams by 7 points, 52 percent to 45 percent. Notably, those numbers came as in the true Toss Up Senate race, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock led Republican former football great Herschel Walker, 50 percent to 47 percent. That’s proof, at least for now, that there is a crossover bloc of Kemp/Warnock voters, unicorns that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein dove into (though it also says perhaps more about Walker’s weaknesses as a candidate). The polling also shows no lingering antipathy post-primary, with both 95 percent of Republicans and Democrats saying they’d back their party’s nominee. Notably, though, Kemp is winning independent voters by a 14-point margin.

It’s the over 50 percent number that is really the driving force for our ratings change. At this juncture, with an incumbent facing negative ads — and the GOP primary hits Kemp endured too — and still consistently pulling a majority of the vote in the most recent polling is noteworthy. Both Kemp and Abrams are virtually universally known in the state at this juncture. Plus, Kemp’s lead over Abrams has been remarkably steady. In the FiveThirtyEight polling average as of July 20, the governor leads the former state Senate minority leader by an average of 5.5 points. The AARP poll also shows that Kemp’s favorability is above water +5 while Abrams is -4 points with all likely voters. Among independents, Kemp is +7 while Abrams is -11. Additionally, Biden’s approval in the state he narrowly won in 2020 is at only 34 percent — and 31 points net negative. Meanwhile, Trump is nearly even in the state, 49 approve/50 disapprove.

Then Taylor noted the money in the campaigns from an Axios report last week.

Abrams has pulled in $49.6 million. Kemp only has $31.5 million.

That sounds impressive, right?

Well, $26.2 million of Kemp’s money came from Georgia! Abrams has only got $7 million from Georgia.

$1.5 million of Abrams’s haul “came from Fair Fight, a voting policy group founded by Abrams herself.”

A new poll this week also showed Kemp has a five-point lead over Abrams overall but is also performing well with key groups:

Cygnal’s survey also showed that Kemp appears to be performing well with Hispanic voters, with the support of 60 percent of Hispanic women aged 50 and older, while 57 percent of Hispanic men aged between 35 and 64 support the governor.

The poll also noted that African-Americans “are not a homogenous voter block for Abrams” and found that a quarter of African Americans aged under 35 supported Kemp, while around 10 percent of African American men over 35 also expressed support for him.

Cygnal’s figures showed that a majority of respondents had an unfavorable view of President Joe Biden, with 58 viewing the president unfavorably and just 40 percent having a favorable view of him.

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