Geography, Ideology and Endorsements in Georgia

In the runup to the Georgia GOP gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, a lot was said (by myself, among others) about factors like ideological differences (real or perceived) between the candidates on abortion and gay rights, and also about the surrogate battle being waged between 2012 presidential possibilities Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich in the latter's home state. Since Palin's candidate, Karen Handel, is now facing Gingrich's candidate, Nathan Deal in an August 10 runoff, we'll probably hear more on this subject.

But a close look at the results seems to indicate that geography more than ideology--and far more than big-name endorsements, may have influenced the results, and could be determinative in the runoff.


Nathan Deal represented North Georgia's 9th congressional district in the House for eighteen years (the first three as a Democrat). Before her election as Secretary of State in 2006, Karen Handel chaired the Fulton County (Atlanta) Commission. So you'd figure that Deal would do pretty well in the 9th and Handel would have an advantage in Atlanta.

That turned out to be very true. According to my own calculations (see this nifty results map from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution), in a field with four viable statewide candidates, Deal won all but one county in the 9th, and took 46% there overall. In the 26 metropolitan Atlanta area counties that are not in the 9th district, Karen Handel won 39%.

In looking at the impact of big-name endorsements, it should be noted that Newt Gingrich's home county, Cobb, is in metro Atlanta, and also happens to have cast more Republican primary votes than any other of Georgia's 159 counties. It does not appear Newt was able to do much for Deal: Handel won 41% in Cobb to 20% for Deal, who was actually edged out for second place by Eric Johnson.

How do things look for the runoff? Well, Deal's lucky that 9th district congressman Tom Graves, who won the seat in a special election (and runoff) after Deal resigned, was narrowly knocked into another runoff by the same candidate he beat previously, Lee Hawkins. So turnout in the 9th will be relatively high.

But in metro Atlanta, Handel's stomping grounds, there's a hot congressional runoff in the heavily Republican 7th district, centered on Gwinnett County, where Handel beat Deal 38-23 in the primary. (There's also a Republican runoff in the Atlanta-area 13th district, though not a lot of Republican voters there.)

Now it would be easy to say that with Deal being strong in North Georgia and Handel strong in Atlanta, the runoff will be determined by the rest of the state. And that seems to be the take offered by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Analysis of Tuesday’s primary showed that the candidates both played to their constituencies and triumphed in their strongholds – Handel in metro Atlanta and Deal in Northwest Georgia. But voting patterns also showed that to win the Aug. 10 runoff, one of the candidates will have to forge a coalition with downstate rural and Savannah.

The analysis goes on to suggest that Savannah-based third-place finisher Eric Johnson could make a huge difference with his endorsement, if he makes one.

That could be true, but there are three other factors that make Handel the strong favorite no matter what Johnson does. First, her Atlanta area base represented almost exactly half the statewide Republican vote, while Deal's 9th district accounted for only 13%. Second, Handel did better in Deal's home ground than Deal did in hers: Handel won 26% in the 9th, winning one big county (Forsyth) and finishing second everywhere else, while Deal won only 16% in metro Atlanta. And third, in the rest of the state, which accounted for 36% of the statewide vote, Handel won 32% while Deal won only 24%. In fact, in Eric Johnson's southeast Georgia base, Deal was in single digits in most counties, and won only 4% in the biggie, Chatham (Savannah). Handel managed to win 14% even there, and generally showed a statewide appeal.

Endorsements by other candidates could matter. Perhaps Gingrich or Palin will kick out the jams and get really active, or other presidentials could weigh in (Handel's already been endorsed by Mitt Romney for the runoff). And maybe Deal's efforts to position himself as the "true conservative" in the race, with an intensive emphasis on immigration and with help from the state's anti-abortion lobby, which has been feuding with Handel, will make a big difference in a low-turnout contest. And who knows, it's conceivable that Handel's support for abolition of the state income tax will get her in trouble given the state's very serious budget problems.

But at this juncture, geography seems to have been the key to Tuesday's results, and should matter most on August 10.

UPDATE: As Harry Enten notes over at pollster.com, the four polling firms in the field (Insider Advantage, Mason-Dixon, Magellan Strategies and Rasmussen) during the final week of the Republican gubernatorial primary did a good job of picking up late surges by Handel and Johnson and the fatal swoon by long-time front-runner John Oxendine. Given the instability of the race, and the traditional difficulty of polling southern primaries, congrats are in order. It will be interesting to see if they venture back out for the runoff.

There's More...

Contract Post

House Majority Tipping Point

There is no set division of labor around here, but Nate generally tracks the Senate and Ed tends to monitor key gubernatorial races, leaving me to keep tabs on the much murkier set of House contests that will determine whether the Republicans have enough political-electoral momentum to dethrone Nancy Pelosi. I've written three posts already this month (here, here and here) about House midterm elections, so count this one as the fourth in what will be more or less an ongoing, sporadic series of posts running from now through November.

The impetus this time is pretty straightforward: The "big news" this week that the Democrats seem to be gaining ground in Gallup's General Congressional Ballot. As Gallup's Lydia Saad writes in her summary of the results, "The Democrats' six-point advantage in Gallup Daily interviewing from July 12-18 represents the first statistically significant lead for that party's candidates since Gallup began weekly tracking of this measure in March."

OK, what to make of this? What might explain the Democratic bump, will it last, and is it enough to mitigate their expected losses this November?

To begin, loyal 538 readers know that as a general rule of thumb we should use +2D as the GCB "zero point" because of the way Democratic respondents (mostly as a result of racial redistricting) are distributed across House districts. So the good news for Democrats is that the latest generic ballot is above +2; the bad news is that it's not much above it, particularly when polling margin of error could account for most of that net 4-point spread. One spike up does not a trend make.

However, for the sake of argument let's presume that Democrats have finally hit bottom and are now starting to surge toward a comeback that will limit their losses to something closer to the historical midterm average loss of about 16 seats, rather than closer to the 39 seats they'll need to recapture the majority. (Related note: As the National Republican Congressional Committee recently and quite correctly pointed out, some national Democrats are trying to move the goalposts a bit to raise expectations about the number of seats the GOP should gain, so they can spin the results in November.)

In any case, let me spitball a few possible explanations for the turnaround:

1. The poor House Republican response to the BP spill, particularly the whole Joe Barton episode, seriously damaged the Republican momentum by portraying Republicans as elevating big business interests over the national interest;

2. The financial reform debate shifted the national conversation away from difficult economic topics for Democrats like unemployment, stimulus, and bailouts;

3. The painful fight over health care reform is over, and voters are starting to come around a bit on the idea of reform;

4. The national Democratic campaign to depict the GOP as a the "party of no" or "new no ideas"* is starting to gain traction; and/or

5. Anti-incumbent sentiment is subsiding.

I listed these in what I suspect is descending order of contribution to the Democratic surge--again, presuming there is one in the first place. (There doesn't seem to be much evidence of #5, but I threw it in there anyway.) If I'm right about this ordering, the Democratic advantage may be fleeting and mostly a result of self-inflicted damage by the Republicans. If, however, voters are starting to actually re-assess the accomplishments of Democrats in the 111th Congress, and note the Republicans' resistance to that progress--in other words, if voters are making substantive, positive evaluations of the Democrats--then the shift could be more real, and lasting.

[*On this question of making hay by depicting Republicans as either having "no ideas" or that they will return America to the Bush era--talking points the DNC is pushing heavily this week--the Gallup survey was in the field before the much-maligned Sunday Meet the Press appearances by the Republican leaders Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. John Cornyn. Even the National Review lambasted their performances and warned against the GOP trying to run out the clock until November in the hope that anti-Obama, anti-incumbent and/or anti-Democratic sentiment carrying them into the majority.]

Which brings me to my final point: If, in fact, voters are coming around to the idea that the GOP is an obstructionist, idea-less minority that belongs out of power, that sentiment may be reflected in future generic ballot results. But I'm not convinced the national narrative has suddenly done a 180, or that Democratic talking points have gained that much traction. Labor Day is just around the corner, and I think we will have a much better sense then whether the Gallup numbers out this week are an aberration or a tipping point.

There's More...

Contract Post

Friday's Election in Precarious Burundi

This coming Friday, the last of three national elections will take place in the small East African nation of Burundi, marking the end of a precarious and occasionally explosive election period. Following local elections at the end of May, which were won convincingly by the ruling NCDD-FDD party, and Presidential election on 28 June -- boycotted by the opposition parties -- that reaffirmed President Pierre Nkurunziza, the upcoming legislative ballot on 23 July may end up being only partially conclusive.

In Burundi, which emerged in 2005 from more than a decade of armed civil conflict, every step in the electoral process has been a battle. Where previously issues were argued by the sword on the battlefield, the political stage has finally taken over as the main forum. However, extralegal political maneuvering, intimidation and sporatic violence have challenged the legitimacy of these processes, illustrating the perilous peace that exists within the country.


The 1993-2005 Burundi Civil War pitted Hutu paramilitary groups against the Tutsi-dominated Burundian military, after which Hutu groups began fighting with each other. The majority group in the country, making up about 85 percent of the population, the Hutus had in 1993 finally been able to get a Hutu elected President through the first democratic election since independence in 1962. Up until the 1993 election, a series of Tutsi military leaders had effectively run the country, though a series of coups, uprisings and an attempted genocide in 1972 (à la Rwanda in 1994) meant that Tutsi (about 14 percent of the population) hold on power was almost always tenuous at best. It was the assassination of this first Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, by Tutsi soldiers, that sparked the conflict.

At the same time as internal discord tore into the social, economic and political fabric of the country (today, Burundi is one of the five poorest countries in the world), Burundi's official military (mainly Tutsi at that time), as well as several rebel groups, took part in two massive regional conflicts known as the First (1996-1997) and Second (1998-2004) Congo Wars. At first a relatively straightforward operation by Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and Angola to dislodge the longtime US-backed dictator of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko, the conflict quickly deteriorated into a bloodbath of fighting and displacement between armies, rebel groups, thug-like gangs, and privateers from the seven countries in the volatile region.

This year's elections in Burundi, the first full election cycle since the peace process concluded in 2005, inherits much of the pain, resentment, poverty and loss of the past 15 years. Though things have moved a long way from the worst periods of internal and external violence in the early 2000s, with committed Burundians and internationals struggling year in and year out to push peace forward, without the common enemy of a 'Tutsi hegemony' to united them, Hutu political and paramilitary forces have been slow to reconciliation and power-sharing among themselves.

It became clear, however, during local level elections that the incumbent party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (NCDD-FDD), led by President Nkurunziza, are the dominant political force in the country. While the opposition leveled accusations of fraud, violence and intimidation and held several protest rallies around the country against the results, international observers cautiously confirmed that the election "met international standards."
It is, however, undeniable that violence and political shenanigans remain the name of the game in Burundi, as monthly updates and periodic special articles from the well-reknown International Crisis Group have confirmed. Regardless of whether it is because they lost in the local elections and are using the well-worn tactic of discrediting the election as a way to stave off defeat, or whether more principled views dominate, the main opposition FNL (along with all others) eventually decided to boycott the presidential election of 28 June as well this Friday's legislative ballot.

The international and regional community, including a personal visit from the Secretary General of the UN have tried to mediate the dispute, encouraging a decisive and peaceful political process. At this point, however, it seems that Friday's semi-boycotted parliamentary vote will offer more questions than it answers about Burundi's peace consolidation process.

---
Renard Sexton is FiveThirtyEight's international affairs columnist and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. He can be contacted at sexton538@gmail.com

There's More...

Contract Post

My Life on the J-List

I can’t say that I hold the Daily Caller in much esteem for making a business model out of publishing the contents of supposedly private e-mails from the list-serve Journalist. I have about 10,000 Journolist e-mails in my possession from the roughly 20 months that I was a member of the group. It goes without saying that an organization in possession of these e-mails, as Daily Caller is, would have nearly unlimited degrees of freedom to cut-and-paste evidence together with the aim of either perpetuating a certain narrative or trying to undermine the integrity of a particular journalist. The fact that their revelations seem to be getting more and more trivial perhaps tells you something.

I haven't been a target of any of their criticism. I'd like to think this is because everyone thinks I'm super awesome and fair-minded, but it's probably just because they have bigger fish to fry. Nevertheless, I’d rather approach this with as clear a conscience as possible, so as not to enable the person whom I happen to offend in the wrong way at the wrong time. Therefore, even though it's not really anyone's business, I’ve decided to review my own contributions to Journolist, which I was invited to join in September, 2008. If this happens to provide our audience with a more prosaic and realistic view of what Journolist was really like, that’s all for the better.

I made on the order of 150 posts to Journolist while I was member of the list-serv, most of which were on the short side. I rarely write long posts on discussion lists -- and for that matter I rarely write long e-mails – because I figure if I have something coherent and substantive to say it should probably go on my blog. Most of the posts were banal. They might involve things like: asking for advice on book-writing, seeing if anyone had contact information for a person I was trying to reach for a story, or clarifying a point of Senate procedure. Other posts involved "off-topic" threads on subjects like food or sports.

A lot of the other comments involved discussions of Democratic or Republican political strategy. Almost always, I made exactly the points in these discussions that I made on FiveThirtyEight. Sometimes, I used the phrasing "we" when participating in these discussions, which I would not ordinarily use on the blog. I’ve disclosed from the first day of FiveThirtyEight’s existence that I’m usually a Democratic voter, and Journolist’s membership consisted of mostly Democrats, so this seemed fairly natural.

In general, I don’t do a lot of name-calling, even in private, and there was very little of that in my posts. I can be sarcastic and I certainly tweaked a few people here and there. But essentially without exception, they were people who I’ve also tweaked in public at FiveThirtyEight.

There were a handful of times when I engaged in discussions about the economics of online media. This is a topic about which I almost never write about publicly because it’s not my "beat" and I assume that my thoughts aren’t very interesting to people. Probably the most provocative thing I said, ironically, is that I thought Daily Caller had a questionable business model because it was poorly differentiated.

Finally, there were two passages out of my 150 or so posts that I'd probably cite if I were trying to create headaches for myself. Both concerned my disagreements vis-à-vis other Democrats, and both reflected positions that I had taken publicly.

In one post in July 2009, after a favorable employment report had come out, I wrote that "liberals are going to need to learn to be more willing to promote good economic news". There "have been a lot of positive economic signals for the past 3-4 weeks”, I wrote, and commentary from the right "certainly isn't going to do us a favor and talk about them on our behalves."

The reference to liberals was intended rather broadly, i.e. to liberal politicians as well as liberal authors, and nobody much responded to the comment. This argument reflected one that I made in public on several occasions throughout 2009, such as here ("If An Economy Recovers and No One Cheers It, Does it Make a Sound?"), here, here, here and here. Nevertheless, it can imagine it being characterized as evidence by a person attempting to prove the existence of a cabal or conspiracy.

The other example is from December, 2009, and demonstrated a more explicit awareness of the role that blogs might have in shaping the media narrative. The post came after I had done a segment on Hardball with Darcy Burner, in which I took the position that the health care bill under discussion advanced liberal policy goals (in spite of lacking a public option, etc.) and she took the opposite stance. This was at a time when some liberal websites were seeking to "kill" the healthcare bill.

In the post, I reported that Darcy and I had a conversation after the segment, and that she had noted to me that it was probably a good sign that the lead segment on Hardball had featured two liberals fighting against one another – that is, it suggested that the Overton window had shifted, and it was no longer a matter of whether a health care bill would pass (this was before the Massachusetts special election) but what its contents might be. “Do you think she's basically right?”, I wrote to Journolist. “What I know is that it's very important for Ezra, Cohn, Krugman, myself et. al. to be pushing back against the claims of the kill-billers. What I don't know is whether the kill-billers are making things better or worse.”

The post elicited a dozen or so responses on the list, the first couple of which concluded that Darcy’s position was incorrect and that the actions of the kill-billers were not helpful to Democrats. Then the thread drifted off into various unrelated tangents.

I doubt that this would be cited as a sign of a "vast left-wing conspiracy", mostly for the obvious reason that it reflected a debate among different groups of liberals, rather than between liberals and conservatives. Still, it certainly reflects an awareness of the role that prominent commentators can have in shaping the media narrative.

But the fact is that I took an aggressive stance on the healthcare bill is no secret; quite to the contrary, I had written a deliberately provocative post entitled post entitled "Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill" several days earlier, which motivated the Hardball segment. I also engaged in many public arguments with other Democrats over the merits of the health care bill over the course of 2009.

I’ve since debated with myself whether this was a wise thing to do. It was one of the very few circumstances in which (i) I took a rather explicit advocacy position and (ii) directed my arguments fairly explicitly toward a liberal rather than non-partisan audience. My feeling at the time was basically that it probably wasn’t optimal from a branding standpoint, but that this was a sacrifice I was willing to make because I’d thought very deeply about my position and thought it was too important an issue not to speak up about. I’m quite honestly not sure whether I’m happy about that decision in retrospect.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing in the posts I made to Journolist that would surprise regular readers of this blog -- the positions I took in private were consistent with the positions that I took in public. For the most part, this is true of other Journolist members as well. People who branded themselves as opinion journalists tended to have strong opinions, consistent with the opinions they expressed publicly. People who branded themselves as straight reporters were quieter, mostly using the list as a means for professional networking.

Over the past several months, I’ve come to the position that I want this blog to speak more explicitly toward a broad and non-partisan -- rather than liberal-leaning -– audience. Certainly, this was a precondition of my deciding to work for a major media organization and of their decision to hire me. This does not mean that I won’t have opinions, or that I won’t take positions on occasion. It does not mean that I won't, personally, be a liberal. I don’t expect the blog to become sterile or dull. But I intend to be fairly explicit about disclosing where I’m coming from, and to make some effort to demarcate which of my conclusions are based more on objective evidence (such as our forecasting models), and where my biases and preconceived notions could potentially come more into play.

At the same time, I’m with Jay Rosen: this stuff is complicated, and one has to work hard at it. I certainly don’t always expect to get it right, and I'm sure that I'll hear from my readers when I don't. As a practical matter, one “strategy” this is likely to entail is that when the dominant political stories are partisan fights that aren’t suitable to objective analysis, I might concentrate somewhat more on areas outside of politics, such as sports, statistics, econometrics, or “culture”. Obviously, however, our focus will be overwhelmingly on the midterm elections between now until November, which should be a lot of fun.

__

p.s. This is pretty much my final "say" on this topic, so please don't anticipate any follow-up, or any response to media requests, etc.

There's More...

Contract Post

In Recent Japanese Elections An Unequal Electoral System Explains the Government's Defeat

On July 11th, voters went to the polls in Japan to elect members to the upper house of the legislature in what was the first major election in Japan since the opposition Democratic Party of Japan ousted the Liberal Democratic Party last summer. The LDP had, with a one-year interruption, held power since its creation in 1955. In Japan, the House of Councillors performs a similar role to the US Senate in that its members are intended to represent local governments rather than the people directly. Its members serve six-year terms, with half of the chamber elected in staggered elections every three years.

Of those 121 seats up for election in each cycle, 73 are elected from 47 Prefectures, while 48 are elected proportionally on the basis of an open-list system. And while the Prime Minister is elected by the Lower House of the Diet, which also maintains sole authority over the budget, on all other issues the upper house has the right to block legislation, which can only be overcome by a two-thirds vote of the lower house.

As a consequence, control of the upper house is vital for governments, and more than one Prime Minister has fallen after a poor result. And in the elections held on the 11th of July, the one-month old government of Naoto Kan suffered what is already being heralded as a serious defeat. Rather than gaining two seats as they hoped, they instead lost 8, and the 44 they won were eight less than the 52 won by the formerly dominant Liberal Democratic Party and its allies.

It is important however, not to overstate the results, as the outcome of the elections had as much to with the nature of the Japanese electoral system as with a shift in public preferences. While the Democratic Party performed significantly worse than in 2007 when it won 40% of the vote and 62 seats, the 39% of the vote it won this time was substantially greater than the 33% won by the LDP. Most of its losses, which took place in multi-member districts, owed more to the bias of the electoral system than they did to a major change in voter preference nationwide.

This bias exists due to the dynamics of multi-member districts. While there are 73 FPTP seats but only 49 Prefectures. One of the major differences between the US Senate and the Japanese House of Councillors, is that in Japan regional representation is balanced with population. While every Prefecture is guaranteed at least one seat each cycle, the remaining seats are distributed according to population. As a consequence, while the ancient capital of Nara only elects a single-representative each cycle, Tokyo elects five.

In theory this guarantees a degree of proportional representation. Due to the nature of multi-member constituencies in which each voter receives a single vote, an overwhelming advantage in support is required to win both seats. In fact in a two party system, if one party declines to run two candidates, 67% is required, and in regions where that threshold is not reached, the minority party is practically guaranteed a seat.

In practice therefore, the system is rigged for the formerly-ruling Liberal Democrats, because the single-member districts tend to be in less populous areas where its support is concentrated, while the multi-member districts ensure that it is guaranteed near equal representation in urban areas where the various opposition parties have their base.

The difficulties this represents for the DPJ or any other party is apparent when one examines the results of the Miyagi Prefecture this year.

Candidate	Party	% of the Vote
Yutaka Kumagai	LDP	26.83% Elected
Mitsuru Sakurai	DPJ	24.41% Elected
Hiromi Ito	DPJ	16.46%
Ichiro Ichikawa	Independent	11.04%
Fumihiro Kikuchi	Your Party	10.78%
Tetsuo Kanno	Communist	5.41%
Mikio Kato	New Renaissance	4.55%

As is apparent, the DPJ had a significant lead in voter preference, 41% to 27%. Nevertheless, the 41% of voters who chose the DPJ ended up with the same representation as the 27% who voted for the LDP. Because the major parties are strong enough to win at least one seat in every multi-member district, this means that the winner of a House of Councillors election will always be determined in the single-member districts. And they favor the LDP as is made apparent by the chart below of where each party won last weekend.

Party	Single	Two-Seat	Three-Seat	Five-Seat	Total
DPJ	8	12	6	2	28
LDP/NK	21	12	7	2	42
Your Party	0	0	2	1	3

As can be seen, the multi-member districts were largely a wash with a one-seat advantage for the LDP-New Komeito grouping (counted together because New Komeito only ran three candidates and backed the LDP elseware). By contrast, the single-member districts provided virtually the entire LDP margin in the election. In a touch of irony, the DPJ actually suffers from the greater representation granted to regions based on population. If the House of Councillors was like the US Senate, with each Prefecture receiving one-seat, the LDP’s lead would be cut to a 25-22 margin, rather than the 42-28 margin that currently exists.

The fruits of such a system are fully apparent when we examine the “popular” vote in Japan, which has been won in every election since 2004 by the DPJ.

Party	2004 Prefectural Results	2007 Prefectural Results	2010 Prefectural Results	Seats 2004	Seats 2007	Seats 2010
DPJ	39.1%	42.4%	39.0%	31	41	28
LDP	35.1%	31.4%	33.4%	34	24	39
New Komeito	3.1%	6.0%	3.9%	3	2	3
Communist Party	9.8%	8.7%	7.3%	0	0	0
SDP	1.8%	2.3%	1.0 %	0	0	0
Your Party	N/A	N/A	10.2%	N/A	N/A	3
Others	10.4%	9.7%	5.3%	5	7	0

As is clearly demonstrated, the DPJ faces an enormous structural bias. Only in 2007, with a lead(including the then independent People’s New Party) of 11% were they able to comb together a significant majority of the Prefectural seats.

The introduction of proportional representation for a little over a third of the seats was intended to mitigate the harms of the system. But the proportional system, rather than being compensatory like that used in Scotland or Germany(ie. One in which seats are distributed to parties that underperformed in FPTP relative to their vote total), is normative, with the result that it hardly impacts the seat totals. This year the DPJ won four more proportional seats than the LDP, but this hardly moved the totals, as is demonstrated below.

Party	2004 Proportional(2010 seats)	2007 Proportional Vote	2010 Proportional Vote	Seats 2004	Seats 2007	Seats 2010
DPJ	37.8%	39.48%	31.56%	50	62	44
LDP	30.0%	28.0%	24.07%	49	37	52
New Komeito	15.4%	13.18%	13.07%	11	9	9
Communist Party	7.8%	7.48%	6.10%	4	3	3
SDP	5.2%	4.58%	3.84%	2	2	2
Your Party	N/A	N/A	13.57%	N/A	N/A	10
Others	3.6%	7.28%	7.7%	5	8	2

As can be seen, by making the proportional seats a minority of the total, and allocating them strictly according to a separate list system, any equalizing effect was reduced to a minimal level at best.

Therefore what really happened two weeks ago was less a massive shift in voter preference than a smaller shift that was sufficient for the LDP to hold onto its lopsided advantage in the single-member districts. In reality, the DPJ only lost 6 seats, three of which were prefectural and three proportional.

Appearances however, are different, as political realities also often are. Whatever the merits of the Japanese electoral system, the DPJ suffered a major setback two weeks ago, one that will make governing extremely difficult in the future. And whatever the actual merits of its performance, the LDP held together contrary to expectations it would collapse in opposition, meaning that Japan’s current two-party system is likely here to stay.

There's More...

Contract Post

Georgia Primary Results

With a bit over half the statewide votes in for Georgia's primary, most of the major races have been decided, or are close to being decided.

In the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Roy Barnes has easily won without a runoff, currently beating Attorney General Thurbert Baker by a 62-21 margin (with Dubose Porter and David Poythress well back at 6% and 7%). Barnes is winning heavily African-American urban counties with even more than his statewide percentage, so race did not turn out to be a factor in this contest.

In the Republican gubernatorial primary, Karen Handel is definitely going to finish first; she's at 32%, but her home county, Fulton, is largely still out, so her percentage is likely to rise. Nathan Deal is running second at 25%, and will probably finish there, though there is a remote chance that Eric Johnson, with 19%, could overtake him when his base county, Chatham (Savannah) reports. John Oxendine is also at 18%, but has no major areas of strength left; his collapse after leading the polls for many months is one of the major stories of the primary.

If Handel and Deal do emerge as runoff rivals, this will also set up a surrogate fight between Sarah Palin, who's backing her fellow Mama Grizzly, and Georgia's own Newt Gingrich, who's supporting his former House colleague Deal.

In congressional races, 12th district incumbent Democrat John Barrow has again defeated Regina Thomas, though not by the huge margin he enjoyed two years ago; when Chatham County reports, he could fall below 60%.

4th district incumbent Democrat Hank Johnson appears to be narrowly winning without a runoff, though former Dekalb County CEO Vernon Jones gave him a bit of a scare.

In Republican primaries, the 9th District's Tom Graves, who won a special election runoff just last month, looks to be stuck in another runoff, probably with the same opponent, Lee Hawkins, assuming Hawkins' home county, Hall, comes in for him with the expected landslide.

In the 7th District primary to succeed John Linder, the incumbent's former chief of staff, Rob Woodall, in something of a surprise, is finishing first in an eight-candidate field, and the expected front-runner, Clay Cox, is fighting for his political life against Christian Right talk show host Jody Hice for a runoff spot.

In the 8th District primary to choose an opponent for vulnerable Democratic Jim Marshall, Ken DeLoach is giving expected winner Austin Scott a real battle, though Scott is hovering right about the 50% percentage needed to avoid a runoff.

And in the 12th District primary for the right to take on John Barrow, as expected, Tea Party favorite Ray McKinney and Carl Smith are headed for a runoff.

The other major news in this primary was the turnout, which was abysmal even by Georgia standards, and may not surpass 20% of registered voters.

UPDATE: Nathan Deal did indeed hold off Eric Johnson in the Republican gubernatorial primary, with 23% of the final vote, and will face Karen Handel (whose final percentage was 34%) in the runoff on August 10. Johnson finished with 20% and Oxendine with 17%.

Turnout in the Democratic gubernatorial primary (with 18 precincts still out) was 388,000, and in the Republican gubernatorial primary, 674,000. That works out to a turnout rate (there is no registration by party, so it can't be divided) of just under 22%, which is below the 25-30% estimates going into election day.

Hank Johnson won the Democratic renomination without a runoff in the 5th congressional district, and Austin Scott won the Republican nod in the 8th without a runoff. As predicted earlier, Tom Graves was knocked into a runoff in the 9th district by Lee Hawkins, which means the two candidates will be running against each other for the fourth time in three months. And also as predicted earlier, Chatham County pushed John Barrow's winning percentage over Regina Thomas in the 12th below 60%. The big shocker of the night was probably in the 7th district Republican primary, where Rep. Clay Cox, who was endorsed by the entire statewide Republican leadership, was knocked out of a runoff spot by talk radio host Jody Hice, who will face Rob Woodall on August 10.

There's More...

Contract Post

Bunker Mentality at 1600 Pennsylvania?

I don't usually like to comment on the scandal du jour, so I'll keep this brief.

Yesterday, a woman Shirley Sherrod resigned under pressure from her position at the USDA after Andrew Brietbart's website, BigGovernment.com, posted a video in which she made remarks to a NAACP convention that Brietbart characterized as reflecting racism. Today, however, it became clear -- first based on remarks made by Sherrod as well as the white farming family that she allegedly discriminated against -- that the video clip had been taken entirely out of context. In fact, the full context of her remarks reflected a repudiation of racism: Sherrod had grown up in the South before the Civil Rights Era, her father had been murdered by a white man, and it was only in helping the white farming family in 1986 that -- with God's assistance, she says -- she came to realize the real struggle was one of poverty rather than racism. Conservative commentators from Glenn Beck to Erick Erickson have criticized Brietbart's presentation of the video, the decision to fire Sherrod, or both.

The White House claims that it had not placed pressure on the USDA to encourage Sherrod's resignation. You can choose to believe that or not, just as you can choose to whether or not to believe Brietbart was not in possession of the whole video, as he now claims.

What there's no ambiguity about, however, is that the White House is standing by its decision, which it now credits to Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack. My guess is that common sense will prevail and that Sherrod will be invited to re-take her position, probably within 24 hours. But what if the White House doesn't back down? And if it does, why did it take the White House so long to come to a seemingly obvious course of action that Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Greenwald agree upon?

I don't think the answers to that question are pretty. It was one thing for the White House to encourage Sherrod's resignation based on such flimsy evidence, thereby enabling Brietbart and other media-savvy activists who are engaged in trench warfare against it. That's bad enough. But it's another thing to refuse to re-hire her. One overarching critique of some of the less successful Presidencies of the recent past is that they suffer from a bunker mentality: they were either too stubborn, or too detached from reality, to acknowledge mistakes and correct errant courses of action. Although the mistakes over Sherrod may not be of the same magnitude as, for instance, the mistakes made in the Vietnam Era, it nevertheless seems that the only reason not to re-hire is that it would involve admitting you'd screwed up in the first place.

There are going to be some tough times ahead for the White House -- beginning, in particular, with the midterm elections, which even under best-case assumptions will significantly weaken their majorities. No one decision from among the dozens that a White House has to make each day can be completely representative of the way that it is thinking about politics and governance (although really, there are two decisions here: first, to fire Sherrod, and second, not to re-hire her). But I wonder about the state of mind of a White House that has chosen this course of action and how that bodes for navigating the tough waters that they and the country are facing.

p.s. The way in which the clipped video came to be produced, disseminated and hyped is exceptionally troubling on its own merits -- the White House's actions should not be a distraction from this. But this is a blog about politics, not about media, so I'll leave that to people on other beats.

There's More...

Contract Post

Democrats Shouldn't Spare Pennies for Lincoln

Blanche Lincoln has released an private poll which shows her down only 9 points to John Boozman in Arkansas. This contradicts public polls of the matchup which have shown her down by 31 points (Magellan), 29 points (Rasmussen), 25 points (Zata3), 23 points (PPP), 19 points (a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was just released) and 17 points (Mason-Dixon). It also contradicts my regression analysis, which says she should be down by about 19 points, given her (very low) approval ratings, Arkansas' partisan identification, and the fact that she is being challenged by an experienced opponent. It doesn't take a genius to determine which figure is the outlier there.

The usual rule of thumb is that publicly-released internal polls have a lean of about 5 points, so that if her campaign released a poll showing Lincoln down by 9 points, that means she's really down by 14. But sometimes the bias in an internal poll is considerably more than 5 points, depending on the pollster, the candidate, and the circumstances of the race. In this case, the Lincoln campaign seems desperate to fend off the narrative that her campaign is dead in the water and doesn't deserve fundraising or activist attention, and so the incentive to put out a favorable poll might be especially strong.

They're desperate to fight off this narrative because it's absolutely true. In a cycle where we have so many authentically competitive Senate races, it would be absurd for national Democrats to spend more than a pittance on her. (Likewise, it would be absurd for Republicans to give Boozman too much help -- he shouldn't need it.) Suppose that Lincoln is in fact only down by 9 points. That would translate to about a 15 percent chance of her winning, according to our model. That might justify spending something on her, but it would nevertheless place her behind the Democrats in Colorado, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Illinois, Washington, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, California, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and North Carolina in the pecking order for resource allocation, all of whom are locked in races in which the odds are closer than 85/15 in one direction or the other.

But we should probably not take an internal poll quite that literally, especially since there's plenty of other evidence to contradict it. If Lincoln is really down by 14 points -- assuming her campaign poll has a 5-point house effect but is otherwise honest -- her odds of coming back are only about 5 percent. If she's down by 19 points, as my regression model suggests she "should" be, her odds are around 1 percent. And if she's down by 25 points -- as the average of the public polls shows -- her chance of winning is only 0.2 percent, making her a 500:1 longshot, according to the model.

Candidates, particularly incumbent candidates, just don't come back from deficits like this very often. Harry Reid is considered hugely lucky to have moved back into a dead heat in Nevada -- but he was down by only about 10 points in his worst moments, not 20 or 25 points, like Lincoln is. Lincoln would probably need at least two major strokes of luck to come back against Boozman -- two macaca moments. And there's no particular reason to think that she's liable to get them: this is a deeply unpopular incumbent (her approval ratings are in the 30s) in a deeply anti-incumbent climate, in a deeply red state in a deeply red cycle, and she struggled to win the majority of votes in her own party primary. A penny saved on Lincoln is a penny that could spare another Democrat.

EDIT: For those wondering, our model assigns Bill Halter only a 5 percent chance of beating Boozman in the hypothetical event that he magically replaced Lincoln on the ticket.

There's More...

Contract Post

There Is No Such Thing As a Free Shot at a Senate Seat

Late word out of West Virgina tonight: the state legislature has resolved its differences and determined to hold a special election to replace Robert Byrd in November, rather than waiting until 2012. Joe Manchin, the popular incumbent governor, is expected to announce as the Democratic candidate.

This will shift attention to the state's lone Republican representative, Shelly Moore Capito, who represents the second district which cuts through the middle of the state. Under the terms that the legislature agreed to -- apparently with Manchin's blessing -- Capito would be allowed to run for both the Senate and House simultaneously.

So, what does Capito have to lose? Perhaps not all that much; her opponent in WV-2, Virginia Lynch Graf, has a charming website that appears to have survived intact from the GeoCities era, and is not expected to present much of a challenge should she be distracted from that race.

Still, this is not a riskless move for Capito. If you look at the list of representatives who vacated their seat to run for Senate, but then lost, it's surprising how few of them came back to have a viable career in elected office. The question relevant to Capito is why. Is it because they've given up the trappings of incumbency such as easier access to capital? Or is it because the loss causes them to suffer reputational damage, i.e. they are branded as losers? If it's the former, this is not a situation that will apply to her, since she'll almost certainly win the election for her House seat. But if the risk is reputational, it could be more salient to her.

Elections tend to be viewed through a relativist lens. In reality, Capito would enter the election being rather popular -- 59 percent of the state's likely voters have a favorable opinion of her, according to the only poll of the matchup from Rasmussen. But Manchin is even more popular: 80 percent of the voters have a favorable opinion of him, according to the same survey, which favors him over Capito by 14 points. By the time we get to November, the (remarkable) fact that we have two relatively popular candidates running for office might be forgotten about, and if she really does lose to Manchin by 15 points, or 20, she'll be the one Republican who couldn't get it done in a cycle where they were winning races all over the map. That could harm her reputation among the national activist and fundraising base, and possibly open up a window for another candidate, such as one of the two Republicans running in the 1st and 3rd congressional districts this year, both of whom are in competitive races.

The other thing is that Capito has a pretty decent hand to play if she stands pat. She would probably be the favorite to become West Virginia's governor in 2012, were she to want that office. Or, she could elect to challenge Manchin then: the special Senate term lasts only two years, until Byrd's term would have expired anyway. Manchin might not be so popular two years hence -- ask Blanche Lincoln or Evan Bayh about what it's like to be a centrist Democrat these days. And although the presence of Barack Obama on the ballot could make 2012 more difficult for Republicans in other states, that won't necessarily apply in West Virginia, where he is quite unpopular.

Failing that, Capito could run for what might be an open Senate seat in 2014, when Jay Rockefeller, who will be 77 at the time, could retire. So this will hardly be her last chance, and it will certainly not be her cleanest one.

If Capito would prefer to be governor to senator, then running for Senate now -- for a two-year term that is liable to be fairly lame duck-ish -- seems like a distraction that would carry mostly downside risk. If being in the Senate is her long-term goal, however, it is obviously a much closer call.

Personally, I think I'd need at least a one-in-four chance of actually defeating Manchin this year to bear the reputational risk. Instead, our forecast model -- based on the Rasmussen poll and a regression analysis -- gives her only a 9 percent chance of winning. But this is a weird election -- Manchin might shed some popularity vacating his office two years early -- and either decision is probably reasonable.

There's More...

Contract Post

Georgia Primary Preview

Georgia will have a very active primary day tomorrow, with competitive gubernatorial primaries in both parties, an assortment of congressional primaries, and even some anticipatory 2012 presidential skirmishing.

Despite all the activity, turnout could be pretty low (25-30% is the most common estimate), and voters have been very slow to focus on these elections, resulting in a lot of last-minute turbulence and uncertainty. This is a state that makes early voting relatively easy, but it appears not much more than 100,000 early ballots were cast, out of 4.9 million registered voters. Since Georgia has a 50% nomination requirement, runoffs will be held on August 10 for a variety of offices.

The gubernatorial contest has gathered by far the most attention. Georgia had nothing but Democratic governors from the early days of Reconstruction until 2002, when party-switching Republican Sonny Perdue upset incumbent Democrat Roy Barnes in a contest that showed exactly how much the demographic changes of the 1990s had changed the state politically. (Republicans also captured the state Senate that year--winning the House two years later--and knocked off Sen. Max Cleland).

After a surprisingly easy re-election in 2006, Perdue is term-limited, and the highly fractious and well-populated Republican primary to replace him is playing out against the background of a comeback attempt by Barnes, who has his own primary to navigate.

On the Republican side, the front-runner until very recently has been former Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, who was first elected to that post in 1994, and enjoyed high name ID and a good head start in fundraising. The Oxendine campaign, however, has been haunted by ethics allegations. Early in the campaign, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Oxendine had received $120,000 in contributions from the owner of two Georgia-based insurance companies (which of course, he is responsible for regulating), operating through Alabama-based PACs. Although his campaign returned the money (and went on to raise about $3 million) this charge is still under review by the state ethics commission. But the commission will not hold formal hearings on the subject until after the primary. The AJC came in with fresh allegations of linkage between Oxendine's fundraising and regulatory activities just the other day.

For most of the campaign, the three other viable candidates in the field--former Secretary of State Karen Handel, former Congressman Nathan Deal, and state senator Eric Johnson--have been jockeying to secure a runoff spot opposite Oxendine, while also hoping the front-runner's ethics problems would finally begin to affect his numbers. The salience of ethics issues was considerably increased when the state's Republican House speaker, Glenn Richardson, had to resign in disgrace late last year after a lurid sex-with-a-utilities-lobbyist scandal, which indirectly affected the reputations of Johnson (chairman of a legislative ethics committee that refused to pursue the scandal early on) and Deal (Richardson's candidate for governor). Then Deal was hit with his own ethics problem, allegedly resigning early from Congress to curtail an investigation of a state contract obtained under questionable circumstances by one of his companies back home.

All this unseemliness positioned Karen Handel very well to run a virtual carbon-copy of the campaign run by SC's Nikki Haley (until sexual allegations and attacks on her ethnic and religious background took over the SC race and vaulted her to a landslide runoff victory), identifying herself as the "conservative reformer" taking on the corrupt and ideologically suspect (both Oxendine and Deal started their careers as Democrats) good ol' boys. Another parallel is that Handel, like Haley, is the protege of her state's term-limited incumbent governor (more of an advantage in Georgia than SC, given Mark Sanford's recent issues). Handel's main problem, like Haley's, was poor fundraising, and the former Secretary of State was also haunted by positions on cultural issues, especially gay/lesbian rights (she once made a small contribution to the Log Cabin Republicans, not a popular group among Georgia conservatives), she took early in her own career, when she was running for office in relatively liberal Fulton County (Atlanta). Handel also got hit hard by Georgia's influential right-to-life lobby, which blasted her for supporting rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, and for opposing proposals to sharply restrict IV fertility clinics (a touchy personal issue, since Handel and her husband reportedly have tried without success to have children).

Aside from ethics, abortion and gay rights, the immigration furor touched off by Arizona has emerged as important in the Georgia gubernatorial race (not a surprise, since Georgia is a state with a highly visible but politically weak Hispanic population). Deal was the first to try to capitalize on it, but the other candidates moved in lockstep to the same position, and Handel scored a coup late in the campaign when she was endorsed by AZ Gov. Jan Brewer (a former fellow Secretary-of-State).

Finally, in a truly distinctive Georgia twist, two Republican candidates have adapted the highly popular (among conservatives, particularly in Georgia, where Rep. John Linder and talk-show host Neal Boortz have incessantly promoted it) national "Fair Tax" proposal to state politics. Both Handel and Oxendine have advocated the abolition of the state income tax, which accounts for about half of all state revenues. Neither has made it clear what, exactly, they would do to replace those revenues, and either might be vulnerable in a runoff or general election to charges that they would have to massively increase sales taxes, especially given chronic recent state budget deficits. Abolishing income taxes, of course, strikes a very strong chord not just with long-time "Fair Tax" fans, but with Tea Party activists.

As the primary has approached, the many months of stability in the Republican contest collapsed, and polls have shown a great deal of flux. [Note: see the UPDATE at the bottom of this post]. Having held back on advertising due to financial limitations, Handel has been coming on strong, and with the same impeccable timing she showed in South Carolina, Sarah Palin gave Handel priceless free media by endorsing her last week. Deal immediately encountered with an endorsement by Georgia's own Newt Gingrich, who has also cut an ad for his former House colleague. Johnson's heavy TV ad spending seems to finally be paying off with a bit of a late surge, and he's also emulated Alabama Republican gubernatorial nominee Robert Bentley by running a positive campaign and criticizing other candidates for personal attacks. The long-awaited Oxendine collapse is arguably well-underway, and the last two polls (from Mason-Dixon and Insider Advantage show Handel surging into the lead, with Deal and Oxendine battling for second place and Johnson moving up into double digits for the first time. A late Rasmussen poll shows Handel and Deal tied at 25%, with Oxendine hanging close at 20% and Johnson at 13%.

In this highly competitive environment, Oxendine and Deal have both intensified their attacks on Handel's social views, presumably trying to counteract the impact of the Palin endorsement on hard-core social conservatives, and Palin herself has recorded robocalls defending Handel as a "pro-life and pro-family" conservative. The rhetoric has grown very heated, with Oxendine and Deal running ads calling Handel a "liberal," and Handel's campaign calling Oxendine "the most corrupt politician in Georgia's history" (much earlier, prominent Handel supporter Erick Erickson of RedState pledged to vote for Barnes if Oxendine won the Republican nomination).

Geography could matter a lot in the primary results; Deal's base in in the North Georgia region he represented in Congress, while Handel is strong in metro Atlanta; these areas are where the bulk of Republican primary voters live. Johnson, from Savannah, has a base in South Georgia. But all in all, almost anything could happen.

The Democratic gubernatorial contest has been much quieter than the GOP's. Barnes has been the prohibitive favorite all along, with the main mystery being whether he could be forced into a runoff. His opponents all have strong resumes. David Poythress, who has served in a variety of statewide posts dating back to the 1980s, was the first in the field and has attracted some national netroots support, but has struggled to raise money or make much of a mark in the polls. Former state House Democratic Leader Dubose Porter has positioned himself as a traditional moderate-to-conservative Georgia Democrat, but has gone nowhere since Barnes jumped into the race; Porter's main distinction is that his wife, Carol Porter, has become the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor, a relatively powerful position in this state. But the main challenger to Barnes is Attorney General Thurbert Baker, an African-American who has quietly been elected and re-elected to his position three times, after serving as Zell Miller's floor leader in the state House.

Baker's obvious strategy is to make the runoff via an appeal to African-Americans, who will make up an estimated 40-50% of the Democratic primary electorate (these are all rough estimates, because Georgia does not have registration by party, making both primaries "open"). But his initial law-and-order message, compounded by a high-profile case in which Baker pursued appeals to secure the jailing of an African-American teenager for consensual sex (or so-called statutory rape) with another teenager, has cut into his popularity with that community. Baker finally started running TV ads late in the campaign, and has staked a lot on a proposal to legalize electronic bingo (a big issue in neighboring Alabama) to fund improvements in K-12 education. He also received a well-publicized endorsement from Bill Clinton, who was clearly thanking Baker for his steadfast support of Hillary Clinton in 2008. But Barnes had a big head start on TV, and has attracted a number of prominent African-American endorsements (most notably new Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed). Both candidates are from metro Atlanta, so geography should not matter much.

In contrast to the instability of public opinion in the GOP contest, the four public polls (Mason-Dixon, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen and Survey USA) of the Democratic race taken since Independence Day have all shown Barnes at between 54-56%, and Baker at between 15-20%, with a significant undecided vote. With Barnes looking very competitive for the general election and Republicans tearing each other apart, Democrats appear to scent an unlikely red-state 2010 victory, and that should benefit the former governor tomorrow.

It's worth noting that this gubernatorial race is one of those that could have a major impact on redistricting. With Georgia due to pick up an additional congressional seat, and with two currently Democratic districts being very marginal, a Democratic gubernatorial win could break up a significant Republican gerrymander.

Speaking of Congress, one of Georgia's two perennially vulnerable white Democratic Members of Congress, Blue Dog John Barrow of the 12th district, faces a rematch with 2008 primary challenger Regina Thomas, a former state legislator, who is banking on liberal (and particularly African-American) anger at Barrow's vote against health car reform. But as in 2008, the incumbent has a vast financial advantage over the challenger, and Thomas is likely to attract little more than a protest vote. The Republican primary in the 12th, however, is a wide-open multi-candidate affair that will probably go to a runoff; the candidates most likely to get there are Tea Party favorite Ray McKinney and former Savannah-area fire chief Carl Smith. This Augusta-Savannah-based district has been narrowly carried by the last four Democratic presidential candidates.

The other vulnerable white Democrat, Jim Marshall of the central-south Georgia eight district, has successfully overcome his district's Republican leanings through several tough challenges. Another Blue Dog who opposed health reform, Marshall did manage to avoid a serious primary opponent, but his almost-certain general election opponent, state Rep. Austin Scott (who dropped out of the governor's race to take on Marshall) is a well-financed and formidable candidate.

Two heavily Republican House districts are also holding competitive primaries, though one of them, the 9th, features an incumbent, Tea Party favorite Tom Graves, who recently won a special election in the district to replace Nathan Deal. Barring odd turnout patterns, Graves should hold on for nomination to a full term, though special election runoff opponent Lee Hawkins, with a strong geographic base in Hall County, could force Graves into yet another runoff, particularly given simmering publicity about a banking scandal involving the incumbent.

Meanwhile, in the North Metro Atlanta 7th district, longtime arch-conservative incumbent John Linder is retiring, and eight candidates are vying for the GOP nomination to face him. Unsurprisingly, all eight have pledged support for Linder's signature "Fair Tax" proposal to replace the federal income tax with a national consumption tax. The front-runners and the candidates with the most financial resources are former state Rep. Clay Cox and former Linder chief-of-staff Rob Woodall. Cox, who has been endorsed by the three top Georgia statewide officials (Gov. Perdue, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle, and House Speaker David Ralston) is the favorite, and could win without a runoff, though the plethora of candidates suggests that's a bit of a long shot.

There is a Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, but Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond (who, like Thurbert Baker, is an African-Americans who has won statewide elections three times) is the heavy favorite for the nomination to oppose incumbent Johnny Isakson.

Retirements, resignations and candidates running for higher office have opened up an unusual number of down-ballot statewide positions, including Attorney General, Secretary of State, Agriculture Commissioner, Labor Commissioner, and State School Superintendent. There's not enough space here to go through those races, but very competitive primaries are going on in both parties for AG and SoS.

Polls close in Georgia statewide at 7:00 p.m. Aside from the early voting issues mentioned earlier, Georgia is operating under a controversial photo-ID requirement that is an important part of Karen Handel's conservative resume from her tenure as Secretary of State. This could have an impact on minority turnout, but its implications are more likely to play out in November.

UPDATE: Magellan Strategies has released a last-minute poll of the GOP gubernatorial primary that suggests an intensification of the recent trends in the race. It shows Karen Handel blowing out to a huge lead, with 38%; Nathan Deal is second at 20%; Eric Johnson has continued his late surge, and now has 17%; and astonishingly, long-time front-runner John Oxendine has dropped all the way to a poor fourth at 12%.

Just three weeks ago, I was on a panel in Georgia with a highly-regarded former Republican legislator and pundit (I won't embarrass him by mentioning his name) who suggested that Oxendine might win without a runoff, and that Handel, handicapped by money problems, might well fade. He also said Eric Johnson could enjoy a late surge, so he got one out of three predictions right. The point is that this race has really upset expectations, particularly if Magellan has got it right. And it's all highly reminiscent of SC, where Nikki Haley's late surge looked a lot like Handel's. Since Handel has not been accused of marital infidelity or attacked for her ethnicity or religion, there's little question Sarah Palin will get a lot of credit, deserved or not, if Handel does romp to a strong first-place finish tomorrow. And if her runoff opponent is Nathan Deal, we'll see a rare and fascinating surrogate confrontation between two potential 2012 presidential candidates, right on Newt Gingrich's home turf, and it could get very, very ugly.

There's More...

Contract Post