Obama campaign shifting some people out of Georgia

Nearly three weeks after dropping its TV ads, the Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama will shift personnel out of Georgia into more competitive states like North Carolina, staffers confirmed Tuesday.

The movement of resources reflects a quickly tightening, state-by-state race for the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House.

Campaign officials declined to specify how many of approximately 75 paid Obama staffers will be redeployed, and denied that the move signaled reduced expectations in the state.

“Even if a huge number of people left, we’d still have the largest presidential campaign staff in the history of the state of Georgia,” said Caroline Adelman, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Georgia.

Voter registration drives will continue apace, and two new campaign offices will be opened this week in south DeKalb County and Savannah, Adelman said.

Democrats in Georgia are counting on an Obama-driven surge of voters to halt a six-year decline up and down the ballot.

But Republicans have belittled claims by Obama supporters that Georgia, which hasn’t cast its electoral college votes for a Democrat since 1992, is seriously contested territory.

Since the January primary season, Obama has aired more than $2 million worth of television ads in state. Republican John McCain has spent his money elsewhere, but in statewide polls — the most recent nearly a month old — the Republican maintains an average lead of more than 6 percentage points, according to the web site RealClearPolitics.com, which tracks polling data.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, issued a mocking invitation to Democrats, advising them to “spend as much money as possible in this state. Millions and millions of dollars.”

On Tuesday, it was the Republican National Committee’s turn to chortle. “After spending over $2 million dollars in ads and investing significant manpower, Barack Obama’s campaign has finally realized that his partisan record is out of step with the values of Georgia voters,” said RNC spokeswoman Katie Wright.

Even last month, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe declared that Georgia remained one of 18 targeted “battleground” states.

But that was before McCain and Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP pick for vice president, received a substantial bump in national polls from last week’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

On Monday, in a Chicago session with journalists traveling with the McCain campaign, Plouffe — while declaring that Obama still has a “terrific ground game” in Georgia — said “some staff” would be shifted out of the state.

“We are leaving all of our leadership there,” Plouffe said. “We are moving some staff into [states] like North Carolina. But we’re keeping most everybody in Georgia…North Carolina is a very real situation, as is Indiana, as is Montana.”

Adelman said the move was not unexpected, and that other areas need the experience in voter registration that the Georgia campaign has developed.

“Only folks who have never run a campaign before see significance in a periodic reshuffling of campaign resources,” said Jane Kidd, chairman of the state Democratic party. “Winners win by knowing how and when to make adjustments.”

But some Democrats were taken aback by the development. Shannon Marietta of Fayetteville, who was a Hillary Clinton delegate in Denver, is concerned the Obama campaign is struggling.

“North Carolina has a much more competitive U.S. Senate race than we do and I’m sure that has something to do with” the campaign’s decision, Marietta said.

It was not a universal worry. Quentin Howell of Milledgeville, an alternate delegate, said it makes sense for Obama to focus elsewhere.

Georgia, Howell said, “is not something he needs to win and it’s not one he probably will win. You can’t make everything in play. It’s good he’s putting resources where he actually needs them.”

Likewise, volunteers at the Obama campaign’s Morris Brown College office said they were neither surprised nor dispirited.

“I would like him [Obama] to spend more money here. But I don’t sense that Georgia has the kind of moderate independence that other states have,” said Bennett Ritvo, 27. “There are places where you could have more impact.”

Two paid campaign staffers worked in the Morris Brown office Tuesday afternoon. Both declined to talk about staffing and referred questions to the campaign spokeswoman.

Ritvo, a former New York investment banker, said she’s considering spending October either in Colorado, her home state, or Virginia, where she said most of her family lives, working for the Obama campaign.

Both states are considered competitive.

Staff writer Ben Smith contributed to this story.