Unraveling Democrats’ Mysterious Judicial Election Losses

The stars recently seemed aligned for Georgia Democrats to accomplish something truly extraordinary: unseating two Republican-appointed Georgia Supreme Court justices. It has been over a century since a challenger defeated an incumbent justice, and this became the Democrats’ top electoral priority. They even dumped a whopping $8 million dollars into supporting Jen Jordan’s quest to defeat Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren and Miracle Rankin’s effort to capture Justice Charlie Bethel’s seat.

Unlike most races, Georgia Supreme Court and appellate elections are decided in the state’s primaries, and turnout suggested that a Democratic victory was practically a fait accompli. Over 1 million Georgians pulled Democratic ballots, compared to around 940,000 pulling Republican ballots. When the votes were tallied, however, Warren trounced Jordan 59.33% to 40.67% and Bethel eked out a victory over Rankin by 51.12% to 48.88%.

How did Democrats manage to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory? That is a question political scientists will mull for years to come, but a few theories are already circulating in the news and on social media that could explain the unexpected turn of events.

To begin with, judicial races are nonpartisan in Georgia and appear the same on all ballots – regardless of party affiliation. So when many Georgians requested a Democratic ballot and saw that Warren and Bethel were incumbents, a considerable number of people may have assumed that they were incumbent Democrats, given that they were listed on a Democratic ballot. This may have mistakenly induced them to cast their vote for the two sitting justices. Perhaps a more thorough public education campaign would have changed this.

Another possible factor also relates to the nonpartisan nature of judicial races. When Democrats made Jordan and Rankin’s campaigns their top priority, they, along with the candidates, made them decidedly partisan. Activists attacked Warren and Bethel as “MAGA Republicans,” former president Barack Obama endorsed the challengers and Jordan and Rankin promised to restore abortion privileges, which is a key plank in the Democratic platform.

On top of this, Jordan is a former Democratic state senator and former Democratic nominee for attorney general. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is hard to claim the mantle of a nonpartisan under these conditions. This could have rankled an untold number of voters who are accustomed to the nonpartisan nature of judicial races – thereby driving them to vote for the incumbents.

There was also the issue of an official complaint lodged against the challengers, which loomed over their campaigns. “In statements that became publicly available [before the election, the Judicial Qualifications Commission] committee said it ‘reasonably believes’ that Jordan and Rankin violated the judicial code by publicly endorsing one another and promising to restore abortion rights,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The commission forbids judges and judicial candidates from endorsing  others for public office or committing to legal outcomes that are likely to come before the court. Regardless of the merits of the ruling, this could not have done much to help Jordan or Rankin.

Beyond this, it is certainly possible that many Democrats were pleased enough with the incumbents to support them. Combined, this may explain why the Democratic-backed candidates fell short, and according to Georgia State University professor Michael Fix, the outcome may have been predictable.

“It’s absolutely unsurprising, and the reason is completely structural,” he explained to the Journal-Constitution. “Many voters don’t have information about the high-profile races, let alone judicial races. They don’t think it impacts them, so why would they care?”

“Nonpartisan elections are the worst kinds of elections. If the average voter has low information about the races, what do you have if you have nothing else when you go to vote? You see the R or D by their name,” Fix continued. “And when you take that away, you take away the one thing about the candidate most people know.”

Considering this, the real question is not why Democrats fell short, but why Jordan far underperformed Rankin. That is a mystery. Perhaps Democrats found her opposition more favorable than Rankin’s, but that is pure speculation.

Even though this was a nonpartisan election, Republicans have widely celebrated the result as a win, but they should be wary. Democrats flooded the polls at higher rates than Republicans. If they manage to do this in November, then Democrats could do something much more shocking than toppling incumbent judges: They could undermine Republican control of a historically red state.