Without Their Precious ‘ZuckBucks,’ Democrats Won’t Win Georgia In 2022

Election analysts who are attempting to predict the results of Georgia’s 2022 midterm elections by scrutinizing polls and analyzing historical trends are missing the elephant that is no longer in the room. The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) will not be participating in the 2022 Georgia midterms.

Georgia SB 202, signed into law on March 5, 2021, prohibits Georgia election officials from accepting private election funding, which was the basis of CTCL’s notorious $330 million grant program under the guise of the Covid-19 “emergency” known as “Zuckbucks.”

CTCL spent $45 million building up an industrial-scale voter turnout machine for Democrats run through the election offices of counties in the greater Atlanta metro area and a handful of other deep blue Georgia counties during 2020. 

Georgia received a higher level of CTCL funding than any other state, not because Georgia was unusually afflicted with Covid-19, but because greater Atlanta contains the largest concentrated pool of potential Democratic voters in the South. Georgia also presented the rare opportunity to swing two Senate seats into the Democratic win column in a single election in 2020.

The CTCL voter turnout machine was based on the promotion of increased absentee voting, widespread use of ballot drop boxes, increased staffing of election offices with partisan activists, expensive ballot canvassing and curing efforts, and targeted interactions with likely Democratic voters.

The Effect of CTCL on Georgia’s 2020 Election

Even when the CTCL machine was functioning at the highest pitch of efficiency — boosting turnout and skewing voting patterns in key Georgia jurisdictions — it still only managed to deliver Georgia to Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes. But Biden’s narrow margin of victory statewide obscures the full extent of the Biden blowout that occurred in the CTCL-targeted Atlanta metro counties, and the Trump blowout that had to occur throughout the rest of the state to narrow Biden’s victory.

The eight counties in the greater Atlanta metro area that CTCL focused on contain only 42 percent of Georgia’s population but received 87 percent of total CTCL spending in Georgia. The claim that CTCL funding was awarded on a nonpartisan basis among Republican- and Democratic-leaning jurisdictions is contradicted by the data from Georgia.

Biden would not have won Georgia without the huge gains he made compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in the greater Atlanta metro counties. In the counties with large CTCL grants, approximately 80 percent of the additional votes recorded compared to 2016 went to Biden. In DeKalb, Cobb, and Douglas counties, the proportion of additional votes in 2020 that went to Biden compared to 2016 was more than 90 percent of the additional votes that were cast. 

These highly skewed voting patterns, combined with a significant overall boost in Democrat turnout relative to Republican turnout, resulted in an increase in Biden’s margin over Trump of a staggering 269,429 votes in the eight greater Atlanta metro counties alone.

All of the Democratic-leaning, CTCL-targeted counties swung much more heavily Democratic, most notably Cobb County (an additional