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Wednesday, December 3, 2008
It’s good to get these things out in the open. Now, group hug, everyone.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Now that Saxby Chambliss has won another six years, some Republicans are relaxing — and a few are forgiving.
Joe McCutchen of Elijay, who has a local cable TV show, was a big GOP voice behind the campaign of Libertarian Allen Buckley — which forced Tuesday’s Senate runoff.
But he endorsed Chambliss once his man was out.
McCutchen just left a message to say that Chambliss rang him up this afternoon, to personally thank him for the help — apparently not mentioning the unpleasantness of the first round.
On the other hand, on redstate.com, Erick Erickson was less willing to let bygones be bygones. He noted that Chambliss said this morning that the GOP needs to return to its Reagan roots.
“You start first,” Erickson writes. Here’s the gist of the rest:
The immigration compromise hurt you with the base. The farm bill hurt you with the business community. The energy compromise hurt you with the part of the base not hurt by the immigration compromise. Then the bailout vote set you on fire and nobody could bother even [urinating] on you after that.
You’ve gotten squishy on financial issues. You’ve gotten squishy on business issues. You’ve gotten comfortable in the establishment and the base does not see you as dependable anymore.
In short Saxby, you [ticked] off everybody. And people did not come out to vote for you. They came out to stop a filibuster proof Democrat Senate.
We all like you Saxby. Hell, I’ve busted my butt for years to get you elected, starting in 1994. And despite hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours working for you (including subjecting myself to Jim Marshall’s “Advising Small Businesses” class just to see if he’d say something stupid in 1998) and constantly fixing that miserable computer system in the old campaign office, I am sorely disappointed in how you’ve conducted yourself in the past few years.
I am even more sorely disappointed that your campaign was a disaster of monumental incompetence and a high level of being disconnected and out of touch with the grassroots on whom you depend for votes and volunteers.
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Meanwhile, up in Minnesota…..
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On the heels of Jim Martin’s big loss in Georgia’s U.S. Senate, the Democratic campaign of Al Franken now says that its internal tally shows Franken ahead for the first time, by 22 votes, in a recount of his contest against GOP incumbent Norm Coleman.
This from Politico:
Al Franken’s campaign attorney Marc Elias said today that, based on its latest internal tally, Franken has taken the lead over Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) for the first time in the recount process.
In a conference call, Elias said Franken leads Coleman by 22 votes at the end of last night’s count.
“We are ahead by 22 votes at the close of business at the end of last night,” Elias said. “We continue to believe we will gain votes during the challenge and review process, and feel good generally where we stand in the recount.”
The official secretary of state count shows Coleman leading by Franken by 303 votes, with more than 6,000 ballots disputed by both camps. The Franken campaign has argued the number is misleading, given that none of the disputed ballots are included in that tally. The Franken tally assumes the challenges from both camps are invalid.
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Of Georgia’s racially polarized electorate, and a winners-losers list
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
On Monday, Public Policy Polling of North Carolina put the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia at 53 percent for Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss, and 46 percent for Democrat Jim Martin.
In the real world, Chambliss won with 57 percent to Martin’s 43 percent.
….We did, like everyone else, underestimate the size of his victory. It doesn’t take a ton of imagination to figure out why we did that. The Georgia electorate is easily the most racially polarized of any state we polled regularly during the 2008 election cycle.
Since we had Chambliss winning by 43 points with whites and Martin winning by 77 points with blacks it essentially meant that every point we over or underestimated the African American share of the electorate by was worth 1.2% on the margin.
We don’t have an exit poll and I haven’t seen any hard data from the Board of Elections yet but my guess is that black voters accounted for only 22-23% of those who turned out for the runoff, consistent with their share of early voting numbers. There was no rush to the polls yesterday as we had anticipated.
Race wasn’t the only factor. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com contributes this thought:
In certain ways, this is an awkward time for a Democrat to be running for office. On the one hand, with the imminent end of George W. Bush’s term in office, and the fact that Barack Obama has effectively been serving as shadow present — Obama is generating between two and three times as much news coverage as Bush according to Google traffic metrics — it has already become harder for Democrats to pin our country’s problems on the Republicans.
And on today’s Washington Post web site, Chris Cilliza of The Fix selects the winners and losers of the Tuesday runoff:
Among his winners:
— Barack Obama: “Had Chambliss won by a point or two that decision would have been second-guessed; Chambliss’ 14-point margin justified Obama’s decision to stay out.””
— Sarah Palin: “The Alaska governor’s high profile swing through the state is sure to be cited by her backers as evidence of her political potency as talk of 2012 heats up.”
— The state’s runoff system, which resulted in two Republican victories on Tuesday. Chambliss was the highest vote-getter in the Senate race on Nov. 4. But the runoff system permitted Republican Lauren McDonald, who finished second in the general election, to rebound four weeks later.
Among his losers:
— U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall of Macon: “Given how close Martin, an unknown former state legislator, came to knocking off Chambliss, it’s clear that the GOP incumbent was ripe for the picking this year. Marshall’s decision to take a pass on the race means that he will face a serious challenge every two years in his Republican-leaning 8th district and may not ever see the Senate.”
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Jon Stewart’s heartfelt good-bye to the U.S. Senate race in Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” had a final, funny take on Georgia’s Senate race last night — with jabs at Saxby Chambliss’ hands-on family campaign ad and Jim Martin’s association with Ludacris.
And, yes, Stewart samples the rapper’s lyrics.
Then, of course, there was Sarah Palin: “Everyone! Hide your unslaughtered turkeys!”
The embed code is misbehaving, so here’s a straight URL link.
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Vernon Jones schedules an ‘I told you so’ press conference
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones has scheduled a 2 p.m. press conference in his Decatur office, according to his former campaign spokeswman Camille Kessler.
The purpose, she said, would be to talk about “the election last night, the (Democratic) party itself and his plans.”
Jones, who is exiting the job of CEO, lost a Democratic primary runoff in August to Jim Martin for the U.S. Senate race. Martin was in turn defeated Tuesday in the general election runoff by Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss.
Martin won 74 percent of the vote in DeKalb on Tuesday. But the 135,850 votes he received numbered nearly 100,000 fewer than he won from DeKalb on Nov. 4.
Martin lost statewide by 315,219 votes — or 42.6 percent, according to the current count on Secretary of State Karen Handel’s web site.
That’s only slightly better than the 42.3 percent that the Atlanta attorney earned in November 2006, when running for lieutenant governor against Republican Casey Cagle.
