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I’m Going to Speak in Georgian A Realistic Primer on the Runoffs in Georgia By Matt Towery In the classic movie ‘The Godfather,’ Michael Corleone travels to a small restaurant in the Bronx to meet with a rival Mafia boss. At the table the boss tells a corrupt policeman who is there to serve as a third party witness that he is going to speak to Michael in Italian. In the movie they switch languages to keep the policeman in the dark. In this piece I’m going to speak ‘Georgian,’ not to keep anyone out, but to hopefully add some realistic context to two situations that have been a cluttered media mess in the past week. The recount in Georgia, despite assertions by the Secretary of State and some of the local media, has been an exercise in futility and disingenuous. Despite statements to the contrary, there was a failure to properly authenticate ballots. Consider some statistics uncovered by one of my colleagues. Data shows that over 15,000 individuals who have moved out of Georgia, voted in the recent General Election. Another 8800 inactive voters magically cast a vote in this cycle. Add to that over 14,000 low propensity voters who basically have not voted in ten years. Almost all of the votes were cast before the November 3rd same day voting. These are not wild assertions, the names, addresses and voting history of everyone of these voters has been obtained and verified. My colleague estimates those numbers have a high percentage of fraudulent or illegal votes. None of this will change the course of a recount in which not enough monitors were allowed, those allowed in many of the larger counties were forced to observe from a far, and signature verification was not even considered. But these dubious voters could have their status challenged for the upcoming runoff, yet so far no effort has materialized. And that gets us the two Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs. Let me blunt. The Republican incumbents, Perdue and Loeffler, are the underdogs. I come to this conclusion not just as a pollster who usually gets Georgia right, but who served as a state Representative, a GOP nominee for Lt. Governor, and as the political analyst for three of the four Atlanta network affiliates. I think I know the place pretty well. And that is where I start speaking ‘Georgian.’ When I served in legislature, our famed House Speaker the-late Tom Murphy used to say, as the legislative session was in its last days, that we were down to the lick log (a farming term) meaning time was up for our efforts. The Republican candidates in these Senate races are down to that ‘lick log.’ Advanced in-person voting starts in less than a month and absentee ballots start being mailed this week. And while former state Representative Stacey Abrams has announced that she has already crossed the 600,000 mark in requested absentee ballots, Georgia Republicans are busy fighting with each other. Indeed they are faced with two branches of their party, one being a narrow Atlanta suburban, Athens, Savannah, and Sea Island establishment GOP. The other a massive North and South Georgia Trump Republican party. With the silence of the Republican Governor Brian Kemp over the voting issues in Georgia, both rank-in-file Republicans and many state leaders are bitterly divided. That is a house divided that must come together quickly and may not. Resentment towards Kemp among Trump supporters reeling from a loss many are suspicious of will make turnout for Perdue and Loeffler problematic. Kemp has been asked to call a special legislative session to clean up Georgia’s chaotic absentee ballot laws but refuses to do so. And the early campaign messages in the two races may further complicate matters. Loeffler advocates have gone to the airwaves linking her opponent, Raphael Warnock, to support of the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright. While that may convert a few suburban white voters, it could also inflame Georgia’s phenomenally strong African-American demographic. Whether it is the Wright commercial, or something else, you can bet that Loeffler will be accused of racism. It’s a time honored tradition in Georgia politics and trust me, it’s coming. In Perdue’s instance, it appears that the well-worn ‘he is liberal’ TV ad (which rarely resonate with voters in Georgia) has been substituted with a he’s too socialist version. Perdue’s opponent, Jon Ossoff has carefully cultivated image of a progressive moderate. Throwing the S word around won’t do enough to dent the Democratic nominee. Just ask the esteemed last living pollster for Ronald Reagan, Craig Keshishian. He flatly declares, in a California version of our Georgia lingo, that dog won’t hunt. And running Sen. Chuck Schumer in attack ads won’t work either because most Georgia voters have only a vague concept of who he is or what he does. The winning Republican strategy must be threefold. First, the messaging to Atlanta suburban white voters, many of whom are on the verge of becoming permanent Democrat voters, must be specific as to how a victory for the Democratic nominees will impact them in a very personal way. That means ads showing solar panels being forced on their homes and social workers substituting for police. And for good measure, a calculation of their soon to be new tax hikes in their city or county, courtesy of lost revenues due to Covid, might make these voters think twice about oncoming federal tax hikes. Secondly, the huge Republican Trump base must be reengaged. Make no mistake, these voters really could care less about the two U.S. Senators. They are completely devoted to Donald J. Trump and only Trump can deliver them back to the polls. In Georgia, Trump not a political figure among most Republicans, he’s closer to a religion. Finally, let’s return to that discussion of the recount. How about those many voters who have moved out of Georgia or who have not voted in ages but somehow managed to send an absentee ballot this go around? There is a short window in which, under Georgia law, their status can be challenged by appealing to their local county election board. The question is, why are Republicans this far into the next round without any effort to do so? For the two Republican incumbents, and for the balance of power in the Senate, we are truly at ‘the lick log.’ Now you know how to speak ‘Georgian’.