Georgia Runoff: What a Walker or Warnock Victory Would Look Like

Maybe it’s because I’m a former high school debater, but every few weeks I try to go through the mental exercise of imagining what I would write the day after an election — if either side won.

It can be very instructive. This was something I did every week before the 2016 general elections. I was struck at how simple it was to create a plausible post-election story that explained how and why Donald J. Trump would win. It was very easy to envision how Democrats would fare this year. In each caseIt was easy to explain the end result even though each case seemed less likely than the others.

Today’s Georgia runoff is a very different case. The election seems about as close — or even closer — than those other contests. But if the Republican Herschel Walker wins, I don’t know how I would explain it. I would have to shrug my shoulders.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t win. Surprises happen. Sometimes, a football team with a great record loses to a team that hasn’t won a single game, even though there’s no good reason to expect it.

And in some ways, a “surprise” in the runoff wouldn’t take anything especially unusual. According to polls, Raphael Warnock is leading the race for incumbent Democrat. about three percentage points. Similar, Mr. Walker was less than one percentage point behind. the Nov. 8 election resultsHistorical records show that the conservative runoff electorate was sometimes more conservative. By those measures, it wouldn’t take much at all for Mr. Walker to win.

But it’s hard to come up with good reasons that Mr. Walker would do better in the runoff than he did a month ago, even if on any given Tuesday any candidate can win.

The problem with Mr. Walker’s core is simple: He is flawed and untrustworthy. unpopularMr. Warnock is a popular candidate. They are also the only candidates on the ballot for most of the state, which is a departure from the November election. This creates a bigger challenge for Walker in the runoff election, than it did during the general election.

It’s easy to imagine several kinds of voters who backed Mr. Walker in November but who won’t be showing up this time. There’s the Republican who didn’t like Mr. Walker, but who showed up to vote for another Republican — like Brian Kemp in the governor’s race. There’s the Republican who might grudgingly vote for Mr. Walker if the Senate were on the line — as it appeared to be in November — but doesn’t think the stakes are high enough to support someone who 57 percent of voters said does not have strong moral values, according to the AP VoteCast survey.

Worse for Mr. Walker, there’s reason to think these challenges have gotten worse since the Nov. 8 election. On television, Mr. Warnock has outspent Walker by a large margin. Now, the polls show that Mr. Warnock is doing better than in the November pre-election polls.

It is possible that Mr. Walker will have to experience a lower turnout this month, according to final turnout data for the November election. The Black vote accounted for a large part of the increase in Republican primary voter turnout. dipped to its lowest level since 2006. In fact, Republican candidates won the most votes in the U.S. House race and for the other statewide offices.

In other words, there’s an argument that the electorate last month represented something more like a best-case scenario for Mr. Walker in a high-turnout election. He still didn’t win. Conversely, the early voting estimates raise the possibility that there’s some considerable upside for Mr. Warnock if the electorate looks a bit more like the ones in recent cycles. According to our estimates, the electorate is arguably consistent with one that’s a few points better for Democrats than in November.

Despite a curtailed early voting window, nearly two million Georgia voters cast ballots ahead of today’s election. According to our calculations, Mr. Warnock won these votes in November, 59-41, giving him an advantage of almost 400,000 votes.

Black voters made up 32 percent of the early voting, compared to 29 percent in November.

But it’s hard to read too much into the early voting numbers. It is impossible to compare results from previous years because of the one-week voting window. And there’s not any hard, factual basis to assert that Mr. Walker can’t overcome his deficit on Election Day.

In fact, early voting and Election Day results are highly correlated — in the opposite direction. The party that does well in early voting will do worse on Election Day. But there’s no doubt that these numbers surpass any reasonable set of expectations that Democrats might have had. To the extent it offers any signal, it’s a good one for Mr. Warnock.

The race may be close, but it’s hard to think of a good signal for Mr. Walker.