Obama camp charts scenarios for Georgia win

Denver — Barack Obama does not need to win a majority of the votes in Georgia to win the state’s electoral votes in November, the Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign manager said Monday.

David Plouffe spoke with reporters from states the campaign considers competitive. He ran through a set of scenarios that he believes gets the campaign to the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. He’s counting Georgia’s 15 in several plans.

“Georgia is a tough state,” he said, adding the campaign believes its ability to drive African-American voters to the polls, coupled with a base of support from white voters, makes the state competitive.

While Republicans have taken the fact that Obama suspended television advertising in Georgia as a sign he’s abandoning the state, Plouffe said the campaign always intended to go off the air during the convention. “We’ll be back up next week,” he said.

Plouffe said the Obama campaign will focus first on holding on to all the states that U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won as the 2004 nominee.

That gets Obama to 252 electoral votes.

Looking across the country, Plouffe pointed to other traditionally Republican strongholds, including Montana, North Dakota and Alaska, as possible pick-ups from the GOP.

Plouffe defined the November battleground as 18 states, including Georgia. Only four went to Kerry in 2004: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Some of those states traditionally lean Democratic. Georgia has not gone for a Democrat for president since Bill Clinton in 1992.

“Georgia is harder,” Plouffe said. “We have less margin of error [than] in Minnesota and Wisconsin.”

Still, there are reasons to compare 2008 and 1992. When Bill Clinton won, he did so without winning a majority of the vote. Independent candidate Ross Perot took 13 percent of the vote, and Clinton won Georgia with 43 percent. This year, Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr could do enough damage to Republican John McCain to again swing the vote Democratic.

“We think Barr is going to do pretty well,” Plouffe said of the former Cobb County Republican.

Buzz Jacobs, McCain’s Southeastern regional campaign manager, dismissed the idea of Georgia as a battleground state.

“We are confident that Georgia, which has a trend of electing Republican candidates, will remain a red state,” Jacobs said from Tallahassee.

Jacobs said Georgia voters will support McCain’s policies on taxes and energy.

Plouffe said Obama can win Georgia with 47 or 48 percent of the vote.

Chad Brook of Atlanta, an at-large Obama delegate here, sees a similar path to victory.

“John Kerry made absolutely no investment in the state and he finished with 42 percent of the vote,” Brook said, moments before the gavel fell to open to the Democratic National Convention. “Between record African-American vote and 400,000 people the campaign intends to register, there’s no reason our percentages can’t go into the high 40s. We can win with 48 or 49 percent.”

Jara Butler of Roswell, also an at-large Obama delegate, also noted that Clinton was the last candidate to campaign actively in the state. Obama, she said, is making a huge investment in Georgia with more than a dozen offices, more than 100 paid staff on the ground. “He looks at Georgia the same way Clinton did,” Butler said, “and every state is in play.”