Georgia in play?
Well, this is kind of interesting. While I think John McCain still has significant advantages over Barack Obama, electorally speaking of course, in Georgia this fall, it is stunning to see the latter holding close to a two-to-one advantage in fundraising.
Of course, there are logical reasons for this - increased enthusiam on the Democratic side and a significantly longer primary process, but it also leaves the door open just enough to make you ponder if this could be a tight election, and that's because of three main reasons ...
- As noted in the Peach Pundit posting, many younger adults - who are backing Obama strongly - don't have landlines for their phones, which is how most polling is conducted. As a result, the poll could be skewed somewhat.
- Obama intends to launch a massive voter registration drive, including targeting what his campaign claims are 500,000 unregistered African-American voters in the state. Coupled with increased registration by younger adults and recalling that President Bush took Georgia by 500,000 votes, it's possible that the gap could narrow.
- The presence of Bob Barr, who is still popular in traditionally conservative portions of the Atlanta suburbs, could pull votes away from McCain.
Georgia has been targeted by the Obama campaign as a state they want to compete in, and it'll be fun to see how it plays out.
Of course, there are logical reasons for this - increased enthusiam on the Democratic side and a significantly longer primary process, but it also leaves the door open just enough to make you ponder if this could be a tight election, and that's because of three main reasons ...
- As noted in the Peach Pundit posting, many younger adults - who are backing Obama strongly - don't have landlines for their phones, which is how most polling is conducted. As a result, the poll could be skewed somewhat.
- Obama intends to launch a massive voter registration drive, including targeting what his campaign claims are 500,000 unregistered African-American voters in the state. Coupled with increased registration by younger adults and recalling that President Bush took Georgia by 500,000 votes, it's possible that the gap could narrow.
- The presence of Bob Barr, who is still popular in traditionally conservative portions of the Atlanta suburbs, could pull votes away from McCain.
Georgia has been targeted by the Obama campaign as a state they want to compete in, and it'll be fun to see how it plays out.
posted by Jmac at 1:12 PM
10 Comments:
Barr is so popular in metro-Atlanta that he lost in a landslide to John Linder.
Prediction: Team Obama will pull out of Georgia sooner rather than later. This is gamesmanship, nothing more.
Good plan, too, but the guess here is they'll pull a Robert Irsay and slip away in the dead of night after coming to the realization that resources--which are finite--will be better utilized elsewhere.
It's a nice story in June. Don't look for it to be one in September.
Yes, but that was when most folks were suffering from Clinton/anti-Clinton fatigue and Barr was running against a more popular conservative.
Plus, John McCain ain't John Linder, and I would expect to see Barr be pushing for somewhere above five percent of the conservative vote, if not more, come the general election.
Another case in which conservatives are just smarter than liberals: we won't be throwing away our votes a la the Left for Nader in '00. We know a vote for Barr would be a vote for Obama, the most liberal major party nominee, possibly ever.
I'd put the over/under on Barr nationally at 2 percent, and I'd make a big pile of money betting the under.
Another case in which conservatives are just smarter than liberals
... as evidenced by your bang-up job driving the country into the ground the past eight years.
...we won't be throwing away our votes a la the Left for Nader in '00. We know a vote for Barr would be a vote for Obama, the most liberal major party nominee, possibly ever.
Barr's gonna get five percent in Georgia. That's a real possibility.
And how is it that every Democratic candidate for president always emerges as 'the most liberal major party nominee, possibly ever ...'? Could it be a clever public relations tool and nothing more?
I mean, more liberal than the Socialist Party candidates from the 1920s and 1930s? More liberal than the Green Party of recent years?
And we say that like it's a bad thing, particularly since the country is trending heavily toward the progressive side after three decades of center-right political thought dominating the nation. It's only natural that things would shift back, as they will shift back to the right eventually.
I said "major" political party. Socialists and Greens aren't major, and for that we may all thank God. Today's Dems are plenty Left enough, as witnessed by the fact that folks like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton are no longer Left enough for today's Dems.
"Driven into the ground"? A little hyperbole there, don't you think? Even with last month's figures, 94.5 percent of us have jobs, a similar percentage make our mortgage payments just fine, thank you. And, oh by the way, nobody's laid a glove on us on our own soil since 9/11 (how many folks were predicting that on 9/12?).
Yeah, we're in an unpopular war. Unpopular doesn't equal unnecessary, and thank heavens we have leadership that understands that.
Yeah, we're in an unpopular war. Unpopular doesn't equal unnecessary, and thank heavens we have leadership that understands that.
Necessary? Really?
Tell me then, what exactly was necessary about war with Iraq? The WMDs? The regional threat he posed? The collaboration with al-Qaida?
Seems to me the first two, you know, didn't exist prior to the invasion and the third one came to be only after the war.
Tell Israel the regional threat didn't exist. Saddam--RIP--paid bounties to the families of homicide bombers. Iraqi bombs rained down on Israel.
At any rate, there were plenty of Dems who were willing to talk the talk about Saddam; one of them--Clinton--even lobbed a few bombs on his own, taking great pains to make sure they didn't, you know, hurt anybody.
W walked the walk, and because of his actions, and those of thousands of brave servicemen and women you believe are acting and sacrificing in vain, a bad character is gone, and the Iraqi people are, in fits and starts, determining their own destiny.
You would not have afforded them that chance. W did. God bless him.
"W walked the walk, and because of his actions, and those of thousands of brave servicemen and women you believe are acting and sacrificing in vain, a bad character is gone, and the Iraqi people are, in fits and starts, determining their own destiny."
Yeah, and Iran, no longer with its great regional nemesis (Saddam) in the picture to keep it in check is resurgent, possibly making a nuclear device, and funding Hezbollah in Lebanon. Yep, that sure was a well-thought out plan old W and the rest of those guys had.
Tell Israel the regional threat didn't exist. Saddam--RIP--paid bounties to the families of homicide bombers. Iraqi bombs rained down on Israel.
Iraqi bombs 'rained down' in 1991 and, if I recall correctly, we kinda took care of that back then. And Israel is in constant threat from a variety of its hostile neighbors - ones much more severe than a neutered Iraqi state posed in 2003 - but we don't suit up and invade those folks do we?
W walked the walk, and because of his actions, and those of thousands of brave servicemen and women you believe are acting and sacrificing in vain, a bad character is gone, and the Iraqi people are, in fits and starts, determining their own destiny.
While the first portion of your statement is absurdly laughable, here's the classic disconnect from reality and shift from the actual stated reasons for the war - regional threat, WMDs, al-Qaida links - to the this more noble notion of bringing freedom to Iraq.
OK, fine and dandy ... but then let's go after the real bad guys in Africa and let's send troops marching into North Korea. If we're going to clean up the world one invasion at a time, then let's get to it.
If you were going to invade Iran, wouldn't it be nice to have a staging area right next door?
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