With all eyes on Georgia to decide control of the Senate, and with it, the potential for progressive legislation, there is one person who qualifies as an oracle. Or as he puts it, “I’m the poster boy for runoffs in Georgia and Republican chicanery.”
Former Senator Wyche Fowler, an Atlanta liberal, lost his seat in 1992 when he fell just shy of the 50 percent Georgia law requires to avoid a runoff. A relic of segregation, the runoff is designed to limit the power of the Black vote. “It was a racist rule,” Fowler told the Daily Beast.
White statewide turnout guarantees which candidate would cross the 50 percent threshold, and it was a failsafe system 28 years ago when Fowler ran against Republican Paul Coverdell. But there’s been an 18-point shift in Georgia’s demographics since Fowler’s narrow loss. “Democrats’ chances for these runoffs are much better than they were when I ran. I got 39 percent of the white vote and 93 percent of the Black vote in an electorate that was 82 percent white, which translated into a losing 49.4 percent of the vote—14,990 votes,” ending his political career after five terms in the House and a single Senate term.
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Today, Georgia is just 64 percent white, and Joe Biden got 49.5 percent of the statewide vote by winning about 28 percent of the white vote and 91 percent of the Black vote, “so you see how greatly different the advantage is 30 years later,” says Fowler, who, at age 80, has “dusted off my old campaign shoes” to work for Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
Democrats have two months to marshal resources for the Jan. 5 runoff. Fowler had only three weeks to bring in the Clinton/Gore resources, including the president-elect, and he says he’s the only example of a Georgia Democrat actually increasing vote share—from 49.2 to 49.4—from the general to the runoff. But he still lost.
Coverdell led the Peace Corps under George H.W. Bush, and he benefited from a flood of outside money, some from questionable sources, plus, in the general election, a libertarian on the ballot whose 3 percent share of the vote tipped the race into a runoff. “The libertarian was put in the race by Republicans—which they deny—but they put him in the race,” says Fowler. Libertarian Jim Hudson went on to endorse Coverdell in the runoff. It’s what Fowler calls “Republican chicanery,” and he says it’s done routinely in state and congressional races.
This election, Democrats aren’t playing catch-up. “Everybody’s got all the money they’re going to need,” says Fowler, and there’s no shortage of people wanting to help. “A judge called me right before you called, an elected judge, he said to me on voicemail that a friend of his has a daughter in Texas and she wants to come and work on the campaign. Anybody who’s ever worked with me in any capacity no matter where they live wants to come and help.”
He’s not advising well-wishers to parachute into the state, but he’s talking up the Democrats: “Look at these candidates. Both of them have a very good shot and not only because of the demographics. Both are excellent candidates, and the Republicans are very weak.”
He adds that “not since Obama” has the Black vote been so energized, and the issues are the pandemic and health care. The Republican candidates, incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are weak on protecting health care. And they’re vulnerable on prioritizing their personal financial interests when they learned before the general public how COVID-19 could shut down the country.
While some Democrats think the Georgia races should be “all about Mitch,” and educate voters on the lockstep control Senate leader Mitch McConnell has over legislation, Fowler says, “I can’t imagine running on getting rid of McConnell. A lot of conservatives with a small c, they like divided government.”
A better message, he says, is protecting health care and getting broadband into rural Georgia.
If the Democrats win, would Fowler feel vindicated? “Sure,” he says, adding, “I’m not out for revenge so much as I am for electing two supremely qualified people who believe in good public policy.” He cites Warnock’s story as the eleventh of 12 children who grew up in Savannah public housing. “I am the finest example of good public policy,” Warnock says in an ad, crediting public housing and Pell grants for his success. “He’s the real deal,” says Fowler. “I think it’s going to be whisper-close. They’re both going to win, or they’re both going to lose.”
Fowler’s runoff was two days before Thanksgiving, a time frame that discouraged turnout. “Republicans figured out early that Blacks don’t come back,” he says. But that was then. This time the Black vote could behave differently, says Frances Zwenig, a longtime Democrat who worked for Fowler and then John Kerry and lives in Georgia. “They see hope for the first time because their votes meant something,” she says. “They got Biden elected and they see this DA (District Attorney Jackie Johnson) un-elected. She lost by 5,000 votes, so it wasn’t just Blacks who wanted her out. It was whites too.”
Johnson was the Georgia district attorney who initially handled the case of Ahmaud Arbery in what came to be known as the “running while Black” murder.
John Lawrence, author of the book Class of ‘74 about the post-Watergate Congress, says what will happen in Georgia has a lot to do with how many of the 800,000 people Stacey Abrams and her Fair Fight Action group registered actually vote—and whether there are additional voters they can get to the polls in a runoff, a racially motivated mechanism unique to Georgia and Louisiana. “It was not an effort to enshrine majority rule,” Lawrence told the Daily Beast. “It was a device to wash out candidates supported by minorities or by a minority of the white community.”
The runoffs could turn on whether Trump will campaign in Georgia, a state he feels betrayed him. “It would be quite a comedown,” says Lawrence, “if he can pull himself out of his funk and stoop to protect these minions.”
As for Joe Biden, he is expected to campaign in Georgia right after the New Year “and he could have his head handed to him two weeks before the Inauguration,” says Lawrence. “Not the kind of start you’d want. But he doesn’t have a choice.”
Bill Clinton didn’t have that worry in ’92. Democrats had healthy majorities in the Senate and House, so the fight for every Senate seat wasn’t a death-defying spectacle. Also, Fowler got a nice consolation prize as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “I have no regrets,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade my five years in Saudi Arabia for another term in the Senate sitting around the Senate floor making speeches nobody pays any attention to.”
In the end, Georgia will come down to math. David Bositis, a voting rights expert, told the Daily Beast that for the Democratic candidates to win, “Black turnout would have to be as high or higher for the runoff.” That has never been the case in Georgia.
Second, says Bositis, white Biden voters who voted against Trump would have to turn out and vote Democratic. Third, “there would probably have to be some decline among Republican voters caused by whatever discourages those crazy people. Biden did win, but the Democrats' chances there are still at best something of a long shot. Everything would have to come together perfectly.”
