DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 12:18 a.m. November 05, 2008
Georgia voters apparently came through for McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
Georgia’s Republicans appeared to withstand the strongest challenge Democrats have offered in a generation, delivering the state’s 15 electoral votes to John McCain.
All the major television networks had declared McCain the winner over Barack Obama in Georgia by late Tuesday night, although The Associated Press had yet to follow suit.
Ron Edmonds/AP
Georgia’s 15 electoral votes will help determine which candidate goes to the White House.
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If the results hold, it’s a back-bracing victory for the GOP and a backbreaking loss for the Democrats, who sensed their best chance to capture the state for a presidential nominee since Bill Clinton won in 1992.
“We’re pretty proud of what we were able to accomplish,” said Clint Murphy, McCain’s deputy campaign manager for the Southeast. “In Georgia, the margin is what’s so great.”
With nearly 90 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, McCain had a huge lead: 56 percent to 44 percent for Obama and less than 1 percent for Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, the former Georgia congressman. But those figures included fewer results from metro Atlanta and apparently none of the ballots cast in metro Atlanta during massive early and advance voting. More than 600,000 ballots cast before Tuesday in Cobb, Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett were to be counted after the live Tuesday votes.
This left Obama’s Georgia team hopeful.
“I’m thrilled we elected a president,” said Caroline Adelman, Obama’s Georgia spokeswoman. I think Georgia still has votes to come in. I’m very proud of Georgians who are ready for change.”
Exit polls of Georgia voters, meanwhile, showed McCain with a narrow lead. The Arizona senator was getting 51 percent of the vote to 47 percent for Obama and 2 percent for Barr.
The exit polls, conducted among both voters who cast early or advance ballots and those voting Tuesday, showed that African-Americans made up 30 percent of the electorate.
Winning the White House was a salve for Obama’s Georgia supporters.
Kiana Pirouz, 25, of Atlanta, was photographing the crowd outside Manuel’s Tavern, a popular Democratic haunt. She was wearing an Obama T-shirt.
About the results, she said she was “Excited. So elated. It feels surreal. Happy to be alive during all this.”
About McCain’s victory in Georgia, Pirouz said, “it was slightly disappointing, but not shocking. It’s Georgia. We live in a bubble here in Atlanta.”
Obama was racking up big margins in core Atlanta counties that saw huge turnout for advance and early voting, but where lines were short at many polling places Tuesday. McCain, meanwhile, was pulling down more than 60 percent of all votes in the Atlanta suburbs and North Georgia, where his base lies.
The McCain win in Georgia is a tribute to the state Republican Party’s ability to set aside its differences and work for the good of the party. McCain lost the February primary, and at the state Republican convention, speaker after speaker mentioned how McCain was their first choice.
But McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee seemed to change that. Evangelical conservatives, some of whom distrusted McCain, saw in Palin a kindred spirit and moved solidly back into the fold.
An Obama victory would have amounted to a 100-year-flood: the right candidate, superior planning, a cratering financial system that broke against McCain and a state Republican Party that was less than fully committed to its standardbearer. A win would feed a Democratic revival in the 2010 elections for governor and statewide offices.
While polls tightened considerably in the final weeks of the campaign, Republicans remained confident that the ill effects of the financial crisis, which caused their numbers to crater in many states, had eased in the past 10 days. Democrats said most polls underestimated the increase in the participation of African-American voters. In the 2004 presidential election, blacks made up 25 percent of the electorate. In 45 days of early voting that ended Friday, they were 35 percent of the turnout.
Both sides made furious efforts over the final days to propel their voters to the polls. Obama’s campaign had mounted a methodical effort in the state that began shortly after he won the state’s primary in February.
McCain meanwhile, largely relied on the state GOP and the better-organized campaign of incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, also facing a tough re-election fight Tuesday. His campaign was organized around regional headquarters across the nation, with central locations responsible for multiple states. His Georgia team is operating out of Tallahassee.
It was a controversial decision, as some Georgia activists whispered that out of sight could lead to out of mind. But McCain’s team saw a red state that should remain reliably so, and chose to concentrate resources on more traditional battleground states.
McCain’s backers in the state maintained that they had the volunteer army, the history and the advantage.
With the race in Georgia pointing McCain’s way, it appears they were correct.
Staff writers Tim Eberly and John Kessler contributed.
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