On Tuesday, former Alabama congressman (and former Democrat) Artur Davis was on the Washington Post’s “In Play” program that goes out daily on the Internet. The topic was the U.S. Senate race in Georgia.

Watch it here.

Davis, who only this spring spoke at the state GOP convention in Athens, said Republicans are indeed right to worry about a U.S. Senate nominee who wanders too far to the right, a la Todd Akin.

Said Davis:

“Politically, Georgia is not so much like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas or Tennesee, despite its proximity to those states. In the states I just ticked off, if you’ve got an ‘R’ next to your name, you start with about 54 percent of the vote and you take it from there.

Georgia is a state where Barack Obama got 46.5 percent of the vote without making an effort. It is a state that has a significant swing vote in the metro Atlanta suburbs. It’s a state that in some ways resembles North Carolina politics more than Deep South politics. Any Republican who’s hoping to get to 50 percent in Georgia – especially if Democrats get their voters out – that Republican has to have the ability to pick up the votes of conservative Democrats and independents, and folks who are not aligned and frankly don’t think or care about politics.

“If a party nominates someone who only knows how to speak to the base of his party, that party’s going to have a hard time reaching the middle.”

Here’s what Davis said about Michelle Nunn:

“Michelle Nunn’s a very strong candidate for two reasons. I assure you by the end of the campaign, people will know that she’s Sam Nunn’s daughter. And Sam Nunn will make a lot of ads for her. More importantly, Sam Nunn is going to be talking a lot about the kind of senator he was. Sam Nunn was a conservative Democrat when you had a lot of those. He knew how to work with both sides, and he represented Georgia in a way that most Georgians felt proud of. That’s going to be a huge asset for her….

“Second of all, Michelle Nunn does not have a voting record. She’s not going to be casting votes in Washington. She’s not going to have to run from the campaign trail to make a vote on the floor of the House and go back home and explain….

“That gives her an enormous amount of freedom as a candidate. Now, she’s got to figure out how to navigate Obamacare. Right now, 60 percent of Georgians say they don’t like Obamacare. She’s going to support Obamacare as the Democratic nominee. But she’s got to figure out a way to talk about what’s going to be the single biggest policy issue in this campaign….”