Georgia Democrats seeking to lure voters back to the fold

A dozen miles from the Georgia Capitol, the popular hiking trail up Georgia’s Stone Mountain is easy, until the last few hundred steep yards to the summit.

The path to winning high office in Georgia looks similar. Democrats and Republicans cruise with core constituencies for much of the journey without breaking a sweat. But those last few tough votes that have eluded Democrats for more than a decade might be coming within their reach.

Georgia voters elected their first Republican governor in more than a century when they put Sonny Perdue in office in 2002. Converting some of those across the aisle along the way, Republicans continued to pick up more seats in the state Legislature and more statewide offices, putting an end to Georgia’s one-party Democratic era.

And since then, Georgia Democrats have been in the wilderness as statewide offices have slipped from their hands. Black voters solidly choose the party, but African Americans make up only roughly 30 percent of all active voters in the state, just about in line with the black share of the population. White voters make up the vast majority of the rest of voters and residents, according to state records.

Democrats have even struggled to find someone to run against incumbent U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson in 2016.

Republicans rule the statehouse comfortably, with nearly two-thirds of the seats. Their voters are mainly white and sit on the right of what they consider the center of politics.

“Whites who call themselves moderates in Georgia tend to vote Republican,” said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta and an expert on Southern politics. Evangelical Christians are Georgia’s biggest voting bloc, he said.

But both the majority GOP and the aspirational Democrats see changes coming to the eighth-most-populous state.

On the surface, the demographics look good for Democrats. “Elements of the population that tend to be growing, tend to be Democrats,” said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. He ticks off a list: non-white people; single, highly educated women; and people who move to metro Atlanta from other regions.

Democrats took about 45 percent of the vote in the races for governor and U.S. Senate in 2014. But they won voters under the age of 44, Bullock said. The Democrats’ path to the top looks smooth if those people keep voting blue as they age and as the state becomes more diverse, he said.

But Democrats are impatient for those votes. The governor’s office in 2018 would be a sweet prize. It would give Democrats a seat at the table the next time the state redraws its legislative and congressional districts. It’s something done by the lawmakers themselves in Georgia, thus a partisan process.

It’s hard to say whether Democrats could win a statewide election then. The party needs to register more voters, do a better job with voter turnout and recruit and train candidates who can appeal to a Democratic coalition that once existed, said Tharon Johnson, a Democratic political strategist in Atlanta.

That coalition of the past included women and men, black and white.

“But more important there were young people. We were able to galvanize the young vote. And so we’ve got to basically have a message that is going to appeal to millennials,” said Johnson. The issues that matter to millennials, he said, are things like transportation, energy and sustainability.

Younger people tend not to be “hung up” on issues like marriage equality, abortion access and immigration, Bullock said. Plenty of Georgia Republicans are skeptical of all three.

As for the GOP, Republicans win top-of-ticket statewide races for president and governor comfortably, but not in landslides. Since about 2008, winners have claimed about 52 to 53 percent of the vote.

Right around those numbers has turned out to be “a pretty firm ceiling” of GOP votes for those key offices, said Republican strategist Mark Rountree. Libertarians take about 1 percent of votes, and the rest belong to Democrats.

“It’s a much more purple state than the officeholders would imply,” Rountree said.

In 10 years, he said, unless Republicans can break their opponents’ hold on black voters, the state will lean Democrat.

In 2014, some 10 percent of black voters voted for incumbent Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, according to CNN exit polls. A state GOP minority engagement director has been hired to try to lure away the Democrats’ base and to urge more black voters to join the Republican fold.

Prominent black Republicans, such as former presidential candidate Herman Cain, exist in Georgia, but they are rare.

On the issues, the GOP does well with black voters, Rountree said. Abortion is an example; both lean against supporting abortion rights.

But it will take more than hard talk about issues to shake voting patterns.

If Republicans want black votes and black trust, Rountree said, the party must start “nominating conservative African Americans who can win African-American votes.”

This story was originally published February 29, 2016 at 12:49 PM with the headline "Georgia Democrats seeking to lure voters back to the fold."