The Cobb District Attorney’s Race By Precincts

Democrat Flynn Broady defeated incumbent Republican District Attorney Joyette Holmes in the November 3 2020 general election.

This is the fifth of our series looking at the election results in Cobb at the precinct level. To read the previous articles visit our precinct results series page.

Of all the countywide races won by Democrats in the blue sweep of the county, the race between Broady and Holmes had the narrowest margin of victory. With Broady at 51.34 percent and Holmes at 48.66 percent, the margin of victory was 2.68 percent.

For comparison, the margin of victory in the race for Clerk of Superior Court was 4.12 percent, in the race for chairmanship of the Board of Commissioners 6.3 percent, and for Sheriff a whopping 10.48 percent.

Here is a screenshot of the distribution of precincts won by Broady or Holmes taken from the Cobb County election results web page (Holmes precincts are coded in green, Broady’s precincts in dark blue):

Note in the southern portion of the county, that in addition to Vinings 04 (the only consistently Republican-leaning precinct that far south in the county), Holmes picked up usually Democratic-leaning precinct Mableton 04.

Mableton 04 is one of the most evenly matched Cobb precincts between Democrats and Republicans, but the Broady-Holmes race was the only contest in the November 3 election where the Republican won the precinct.

So what accounts for the relative popularity of Joyette Holmes, who like Warren, is part of the Cobb County criminal justice system?

Holmes had built relationships with many Democratic activists, and received endorsements from some prominent Democratic activists and political figures, including incoming Cobb Board of Education member Leroy Tre’ Hutchins, Powder Springs City Councilwoman Doris Dawkins, and former Democratic State Representative Alisha Thomas Morgan.

She also built good will with her work on record expungement for people who had been accused of felonies but not convicted.

She had also, however, come under criticism from some Democratic criminal justice reform activists for what they viewed as her inadequate handling of the investigation into the death of Kevil Wingo in the Cobb County Adult Detention Center.

Despite her defeat by Flynn Broady, she managed to break the 50 percent mark for margin of victory in one precinct she won, Marietta 4A, won a Democratic-leaning Mableton precinct, and did not get beaten as badly in the solidly Democratic precincts as incumbent Republican Sheriff Neil Warren did, which kept her overall margin of defeat narrower than Warren’s.

The narrowest margins of victory were both on the northern edge of the county, adjacent to Cherokee County: Wade Green 02, where Holmes eked out a 0.40 margin of victory, and Bells Ferry 03, where she won by a margin of 0.43 percent.

The widest margins of victory were Broady’s wins in heavily Democratic South Cobb precincts Bryant 01 and Bryant 02, by 76.62 and 73.82 percentage points.

So both the widest and narrowest margins of victory were on opposite north-south edges of the county.

Here is the complete list of precinct outcomes. To see the map of any precinct, click on the name.

POSTED BY: LARRY FELTON JOHNSON DECEMBER 5, 2020

View The Original Article On The Cobb County Courier