Georgia a political plum

The landscape of Georgia politics has changed dramatically in the wake of Tuesday’s election.

It has changed in ways large and small, ways easily identifiable and in ways that are hidden among the data. It is an atypical outcome disguised as typical local results.

The Republican nominee won Georgia, same as every presidential election since 1992. But Democratic President-elect Barack Obama outperformed every Democratic candidate here since JFK, with the exception of homegrown Jimmy Carter. Obama didn’t just stretch the GOP, he left behind an infrastructure Democrats could use for years to come.

And there’s the U.S. Senate race to be resolved, where an incumbent Republican is being challenged to the end by a former state lawmaker who had to be talked into running last spring when the chance of winning seemed so small.

Democrats gained a net two seats in the Georgia House. The number is almost less important than the geography of the pickups: Marietta and Lawrenceville, two key suburban cities, will now have Democratic representation in the General Assembly.

Georgia Republicans see John McCain’s 52 percent to 47 percent victory over Obama and find signs of continued dominance. Democrats see reason for hope, but have to wonder: If not this year, with all its advantages, what will it take to win?

“It just reconfirms that Georgia is really a solid Republican state,” said Eric Tanenblatt, an Atlanta lawyer and Republican activist. Tanenblatt ran Bob Dole’s 1996 Georgia presidential campaign and was a delegate to this year’s Republican National Convention.

“Even with the national movement toward Obama and all these new people who came out to vote, the fact that McCain still carried it I think speaks volumes about where the Republican Party is.”

He ticked off evidence of Republican strength: A 7-to-6 majority of congressional seats, both U.S. Senate seats (assuming incumbent Sen. Saxby Chambliss survives the probable runoff), majorities in the General Assembly, the governor, the lieutenant governor.

“We’re still a solid red, conservative state,” Tanen- blatt said.

Others are not as comfortable with the adjective “solid.”

A Democrat, Bill Clinton, won the state in 1992 with 43 percent of the vote. Clinton lost Georgia to Bob Dole in 1996 but increased his share to 46 percent. In 2000, both Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush ran television advertisements here. The state was a battleground before Bush pulled ahead to win with 55 percent.

In 2002 the bottom fell out for Democrats, and Republicans began a rapid ascension.

Ralph Reed, the former state GOP chairman and national Christian Coalition leader, warns that his fellow Republicans must not rely on past performance as a predictor of future success.

He called it “wishful thinking” to believe that GOP success in 2002, 2004 and 2006 erases a generation of Democratic dominance.

“We have the making of a competitive state if —- and this is a critical point —- if Democrats recruit and run candidates with broad statewide appeal,” Reed said.

The bottom line, Reed said, is a wake-up call for the party: “A hard majority in Georgia is not a given or a birthright. It was built with sweat equity and hard work and putting forth of bold new ideas. If Republicans ever stop doing those things, we will not be a majority party.”

Keith Mason hears a story in Tuesday’s numbers he can applaud.

A Georgia Democrat, Mason shares a work address with Tanenblatt at Atlanta’s McKenna Long & Aldridge law firm and is a former Clinton White House official.

He uses terms such as “lagging political indicators” to describe the state of play in Georgia: “The makeup of [Georgia’s] elected officials don’t necessarily match the makeup of the state’s voting demographics.” What he means is the state is not as Republican as recent election results would suggest.

The survey of Tuesday’s voters, conducted for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other news organizations, found Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state. The poll found 38 percent of voters identified themselves as Democrats, 35 percent as Republicans and 28 percent as independents or followers of another party.

That’s a major shift from four years ago when 42 percent of Georgia voters called themselves Republicans and 34 percent said Democrat.

Equally significant, however, and the likely source of the current Republican superiority is the chunk of Georgia voters who call themselves independents. In 2004, they were 24 percent of the electorate and 60 percent of their votes went to Bush’s re-election. This year, exit polls found self-described independents were 28 percent of all voters and 57 percent of them chose McCain.

Party identification in a state that does not require it to vote, however, is fleeting.

Still, Mason finds it an important qualifier.

“We are not as red as people thought we were,” Mason said. “We’re increasingly purple and we have a chance to become blue before [Obama] leaves office.”

Obama has already established benchmarks here. His 47 percent is third-highest for any Democrat running for president since 1960. Carter, the former governor, took 67 percent in 1976 and 56 percent four years later.

But Obama also set a standard for the base: African-American voters. When Bush pounded Democrat John Kerry in 2004, black voters made up 25 percent of the electorate. This past Tuesday, according to the exit polls, African-Americans cast 30 percent of all ballots.

That is significant because not only did more black voters participate, they increasingly chose Obama, who will become the nation’s first black president. Kerry drew 88 percent of all black votes; Obama, 98 percent.

Conversely, white voters did not abandon the black Democrat —- or at least not much more than usual. In 2004, Kerry received 25 percent of all white votes. This past Tuesday, Obama received 23 percent.

While Obama drew close to victory in Georgia, he nosed through the tape to win in Virginia and North Carolina, two Southern states with demographics similar to Georgia’s. Both those states elected Democrats to the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, while North Carolina also elected a Democratic governor.

Mason believes Georgia is on the cusp of similar Democratic success. But to others it says more that Democrats couldn’t win this year.

Consider: The cratering of the economy boosted Democrats across the country; McCain was widely known not to be the first choice of many Republicans; Obama built an unprecedented ground game that had even Republicans such as Tanenblatt whistling in admiration; African-American registration and turnout spiked; the sitting Republican president is a pariah even here (60 percent disapprove of his job performance, the exit poll found); and the mood was generally sour for the GOP.

The key, Mason said, is to continue to grow the party. Virginia and North Carolina, he said, are about one full election cycle ahead of Georgia’s political evolution.

Reed agrees that there is a pendulumlike pattern to these things.

“The South has sort of swung back and forth over the last 20 years or so from being reliably Republican to being more competitive and more of a swing region,” he said.

Tuesday night as he watched election returns deliver the bittersweet news, state Sen. John Wiles (R-Kennesaw) took solace in McCain winning Georgia and the state GOP limiting its losses to two House seats.

The outcome, he said, “gives us the power to continue to govern with a mandate, that [the voters] want us to control. We’ve shown the state of Georgia that we tell the people what we want to do, and then we go do it.”

At five minutes to midnight on Tuesday, Alec Poitevint, a Republican national committeeman and chairman of the McCain campaign in Georgia, said he’s very proud of Georgia’s performance.

Despite being outspent by the Obama campaign, the GOP galvanized an “army of 40,000” campaign volunteers, and Chambliss engaged in “old-fashioned, retail politics” to reach the GOP base in Georgia, he said.

For Democrats, Obama showed that the state is not far from becoming truly purple, if not blue. He did it with technology, rigid adherence to a grass-roots plan and volunteer mobilization. Those are different methods than Democrats have traditionally relied upon.

“There’s a growing realization among active Democrats that the key to retaking a majority and turning Georgia blue again is not to reassemble the old coalition from the ’70s and ’80s but maximize your growth in these suburban areas and create a new Democratic majority,” said state Rep. Rob Teilhet (D-Smyrna). He is one of a group of young Democratic leaders to whom the challenge will fall.

Another is R.J. Hadley, spokesman for the party in Rockdale County, which just elected its first African-American as chairman of the County Commission. The county party, Hadley said, brought 11,000 new voters to the second-smallest county in the state.

“We made history here,” Hadley said.

Staff writers Rachel Ramos and Craig Schneider contributed to this report.

A BLUE SHIFT

Republican John McCain won the state in Tuesday’s election, but there was an increase of Democratic votes this year compared with 2004. For example, Democratic votes in Gwinnett County increased by more than 20 percentage points in the 2008 election compared with the 2004 election.

 JEMAL R. BRINSON / Staff and The New York Times 
Trend of how Georgia counties voted in 2008 compared with 2004: 

Map shows a color-coded Georgia divided by counties which represent:

Democratic +5  +10  +20  pct. pts. 
Republican +5  +10  +20  pct. pts.
TIE OR INSUFFICIENT DATA 

Sources: The New York Times, Associated Press