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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
A familiar looking sign
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Every election has a few sign flaps, and this one wouldn’t be worth a mention if it didn’t involve a corporate logo and the secretary of state race.
Driving to work Tuesday morning, Randy Lewis says he spotted his first Gail Buckner sign. He and his partner in a public relations firm, Sandy Fitzpatrick, say they immediately identified the logo on the sign as identical to the one they paid a graphic artist to design for two websites they publish, the Georgia Daily Digest and Georgia Political Digest.
Lewis sent a letter to Buckner Wednesday, but the former legislator, who finished first in Tuesday’s Democratic primary and faces Darryl in a runoff, said she’d already ordered the signs to be pulled.
Buckner said her printer, who produced the sign, thought the logo was in the public domain, but she wasn’t going to contest the issue, and would change to a new yard sign. Running for an office that handles incorporations and such, this isn’t an issue you want to linger.
Raw numbers: a reality check
An election in which the numbers didn't match the hype
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Tuesday – we’re using 97 percent returns here – a total of 402,764 people voted in the most heavily publicized down-ticket race in the history of Georgia for sure, and maybe of the USA.
And in what may have been the least-noticed contested Democratic primary race for lieutenant governor ever in this state, 443,226 voted. Democrats have always had bigger primaries in Georgia, but the comparison in this particular race is still striking considering the huge difference in the hype.
Many Republicans are breathing a sign of relief today that the shadow of Jack Abramoff won’t be hanging over the fall campaign, and that Gov. Sonny Perdue has been delivered up the Democrat they’ve worried about least, with a hefty lead in the polls.
But a raw-number comparison of both statewide and legislative races paints a picture of a competitive two-party state that neither Republicans nor Democrats can take for granted.
Sure, these numbers are affected by some rural counties where the big local races are still in the Democratic primary, but that’s being swiftly offset by the Republican dominance in the ‘burbs.
Speaking of taking for granted, here are the starkest numbers to emerge from the Republican primary: Ray McBerry got 48,113 in the governor’s race against Sonny Perdue, and Ralph Reed lost to Casey Cagle by 49,126 votes.
By no means does that say the flaggers, whose cause McBerry represents, elected Cagle. It does indicate Reed got into the kind of cross-issue stew that poisoned Roy Barnes.
Back in ’02, it was the flaggers plus the teachers plus the county sheriffs who defeated Barnes in many South Georgia counties. This year, it was the flaggers plus the disaffected churchgoers who hurt Reed in the same areas.
Question: What do those 48,000-odd voters do this fall?
