Sweet Georgia Red

K elly Loeffler could have spent the last 15 months licking nasty wounds, and who could have blamed her? Her painful U.S. Senate run-off special-election loss to hard-core leftist Democrat Raphael Warnock — paired on the same night with incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue’s run-off defeat to progressive Jon Ossoff — handed control of Congress to the Democrats, hearkening to the Charlie Daniels Band’s tune that the devil may indeed have come down to Georgia. But maybe not to stay.

Loeffler has dedicated the intervening, pouting-free year to building and orchestrating something politically consequential, evident in the results of Georgia’s recent primaries. Launching Greater Georgia last year, Loeffler and her team set about raising funds (a lot her own money) and developing a winning strategy to activate the enormous number of conservative voters — a bloc that clearly had the potential to have flipped the 2021 special-elections’ outcomes — who had become part of that ugly category: the “disenfranchised.”

Specifically, on January 5, 2021, they proved to be non-voters. Last month, they proved reengaged.

Why the turnaround?

First, about those devastating special elections: What happened? Opinion-research maven David Burrell, CEO of the Atlanta-based Wick, invokes one piece of data. That would be a survey (conducted before the May primaries) of 500 Georgia “modeled conservative voters” (64 percent Republicans, 12 percent Democrats, the remaining independent) who (1) had voted in November 2020, but (2) sat it out a mere two months later. This survey found the January 2021 no-show was largely the result of these voters’ “lack of confidence in the 2020 election outcome.” (Take a bow, Donald Trump, who emphatically drove that message in the run-up to the special elections.)

But the survey of the disenfranchised also showed there was an upside to be had. While 83 percent of the disenfranchised said they “feel at some level the election was rigged,” there was some indication that they were not forever done with voting. Another 83 percent of those surveyed “indicated they would be more likely to vote on some level in the 2022 midterms if they felt like the election was fair and accurate.” They had a head start: Many (61 percent of respondents) said “they are already confident in the security of Georgia’s elections thanks to the passage of legislation in 2021” — the state’s famous / infamous “Election Integrity Act.” That is, the law disingenuously and violently attacked, by everyone from the White House to MSNBC to Major League Baseball and a boatload of sniveling corporations, as a racist attempt at voter-suppression.

If we leave aside the impact and value of Donald Trump’s political influence, we can see that primary Election Day in Georgia proved several things. One is that the Georgia election-reform law accomplished what its supporters pledged — in the face of relentless, high-level, hyperbolic attacks: that it would enhance voting. It did: Turnout was historic. Nearly 1.93 million Georgians voted in the 2022 primary, compared with 1.16 million in 2018. Do the math: That’s a massive, two-thirds increase, and a kiboshing of the Left’s nasty allegations about the law’s intended voter suppression. If there ever was a guy named Jim Crow, he was spinning in his grave on May 24, as confidence in election integrity clearly won the day.

As for party breakdown in the primaries, over 1.2 million Georgians cast Republican ballots, with Democrats registering 724,244 — that was an increase for the GOP of 89 percent from 2018, far outpacing the 30 percent gain experienced by Democrats. The timetable has moved up: Many voters showed they were not waiting for the midterms to possibly reengage. The sweet-and-clear data shows that the road has led back to the ballot box.

Accessing information from absentee- and early-voting turnout, Greater Georgia has run the numbers: Pre–Election Day voting was up 166 percent over 2018, sparked in part by 85,000 Republican-ballot voters who had not participated in any of the state’s previous four primaries. Nearly 22,000 disenfranchised conservatives were also among the early voters. And compared with 2018, GOP voters were up 375 percent among Asians, 281 percent among Blacks, and nearly 400 per cent among Hispanics.

Another thing the primary results proved was the GOP voter renaissance is the result of sweat and smarts. If something’s to blame for the motivation — besides the endless calamities of the Biden presidency, confidence in election integrity sparked by the reform law, and strong primary candidates, such as incumbent Governor Brian Kemp — it’s Greater Georgia. Founded by Loeffler, who showed herself as a determined and engaged chairwoman, the organization embarked on an ambitious, yearlong effort to contact and motivate over 1 million “unregistered, disengaged, and disenfranchised conservatives” via nearly 2 million voter contacts — calls, texts, community events, ads, roundtables, aggressive voter-registration drives, you name it. Going toe to toe with the Democratic ground-game tactics, which strike fear in the hearts of many a Republican operative, Greater Georgia’s sustained mobilization and education efforts and strategy proved consequential, even decisive. The Peach State’s disaffected conservatives seem a lot less disenfranchised.

Of the many things that portends, one is that Democrat incumbent senator Raphael Warnock has good reason to be concerned about his November contest against Herschel Walker, the gridiron star who won his GOP primary.

And if one may conclude an important lesson to be had from the primary’s outcomes and data, it’s this: The hard work performed by Georgia conservatives, coupled with real election-integrity reform that actually protects and expands voting, show that the province of early voting — rightly a bugaboo of many who find it a permissive opportunity for political shenanigans, and when the value of a vote gets discounted — is no longer the exclusive plaything and monopoly of the Left.