COLLEGE PARK, Georgia — Democrats have made a national cause of turning Texas blue, even though the chances that Wendy Davis will win the governor’s race this fall remain small — and the likelihood that Texas will be a true battleground any time before 2028 probably even smaller.
Georgia, on the other hand, is happening now.
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Democrats here don’t have to wait for the demographic projections to come true. The state’s voting population is already much more African-American than even 10 years ago, Latinos are on the rise, and there’s a business community relocating to the Atlanta metro area at a pace that looks a lot like the migration to Northern Virginia and the North Carolina research triangle the past 15 years that turned both states into presidential battlegrounds.
Those shifts, together with the surprisingly competitive candidacies of Senate hopeful Michelle Nunn and gubernatorial contender Jason Carter, have convinced more than a few Democrats here that the Republican lock on the Peach State could be broken as soon as November.
It’s a tall task, no question: Nunn has her hands full against businessman David Perdue — who edged out Rep. Jack Kingston in the Republican Senate primary runoff Tuesday night — as does Carter in his bid to oust Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.
But a win by either Democrat would deliver a jolt so powerful that it could potentially reshape the national political landscape: Yes, Texas has its 38 electoral votes, but putting Georgia’s 16 votes in play could do just as much to complicate the GOP’s path to the White House.
“Georgia’s next in line as a national battleground state,” Carter said during a break at a campaign stop last week. “If you look at sheer numbers, people can dispute whether it’s red or blue, but everybody knows where it’s headed.”
The rumblings of change are happening, to the surprise of many, here at a Wal-Mart parking lot on the heavily African-American south side of Atlanta, where an older man nudges through a crowd to introduce his grandson to the Democrat running for governor. Jason Carter smiles — not the same toothy grin that became the unofficial logo of Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, just his top lip pulled back eagerly — as he poses for one cellphone photo after another.
“You know,” Carter says to the man, “I get introduced as a grandson all the time.”
That introduction was enough to help Carter win a state Senate seat four years ago, and enough to draw him more attention last year than most long shots against Deal would get just for entering the race.
No one was really expecting what happened next. Carter started pulling even and, according to some polls, ahead in the race. Meanwhile, in the open Senate race for Saxby Chambliss’s seat, where Republicans just finished a multi-month process of picking their nominee, Nunn has been up repeatedly over generic Republican challengers — and that, her supporters point out, is before she’s had the chance to really focus attacks on a GOP opponent.
Michael McNeely, vice chairman of the state Republican Party, scoffs at the idea that Georgia is at any risk of turning blue.
“We can agree that the demographics are changing,” McNeely said, noting state GOP efforts like rechartering the Morehouse College Republicans and hiring a minority outreach director. “However, the beliefs of people and the fact that this is a conservative state are not.”
And there’s a lot to support that view. Republicans control every partisan statewide office and have a supermajority in the state Legislature. The last Democrat to carry the state in a presidential race was Bill Clinton in 1992. President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign looked early on at trying to put the state in play, but the idea never made it beyond a whiteboard exercise.
Of states where Obama didn’t campaign or spend money, Georgia yielded the best results: 45.5 percent. The question that Obama campaign staffers had then and continue to ask is whether that’s a floor or a ceiling.
From a distance, the Democratic movement this year could look like a deliberate, long-laid plan from a state party that’s doing what state parties are supposed to do. First get Nunn, the daughter of beloved former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and herself the former head of George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light Foundation, to run for the Senate seat in 2014. Maybe she wins, but if not, she sets herself up to run for what could be another open Senate in 2016 (there’s speculation that Sen. Johnny Isakson will retire, though he insists he’s gearing up to run).
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/georgia-election-2014-democrats-109267.html#ixzz38KlRaDi8
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