The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
After conventions, eyes turn to Georgia
State could gain more attention this year, both parties agree.
PHILADELPHIA — Almost every time a Georgian took the stage at the Democratic National Convention last week, he or she used the spotlight to repeat a familiar claim: Georgia is now a battleground state.
The difference this time is that the highest levels of Republican officialdom also warn that the state may no longer be a safe GOP bet. At least not this year.
Georgia still isn’t directly in Democrat Hillary Clinton’s cross hairs. You’d know it if it was. The election would be even more inescapable. Nonstop advertisements. Frequent visits from Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. And enough mudslinging from their surrogates to fill up Underground Atlanta.
Those things could still happen.
A common strain from the Democratic and Republican meetings that just ended was that Georgia has the chance to turn blue for the first time since Bill Clinton’s 1992 win over President George H.W. Bush.
“If all of a sudden Georgia is at a place where it’s literally neck-and-neck and that’s what makes the most sense to get to 270 (electoral votes),” said Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s state campaign director, “then we’ll definitely take a look at it.”
For Republicans in Cleveland, there were ominous warnings about how this generation of GOPers couldn’t be the ones to lose Georgia and its 16 electoral votes. For Democrats in Philadelphia, there were joyous proclamations, almost as if they were trying to convince themselves, that the tides could be shifting.
John Bush, an Atlanta attorney, supported just about every candidate but Trump in the primary, lurching from Scott Walker to Rick Perry to Marco Rubio. He was decidedly ambivalent about the businessman going into this month’s conventions. And now?
“I don’t know what Donald Trump’s coattails are, but the game-changer for me after Cleveland is that I’m willing to help out Donald Trump in whatever form that takes,” he said. “I’m not just going to cast my ballot in November — I’m working for him.”
Tonya Thiel, a stay-athome mother from Smyrna, was just as adamant about backing anyone but Clinton in the Democratic primary. She was inspired by Bernie Sanders — and pained by the leaked emails that showed party leaders tried to undermine his campaign. But the constant drumbeat of Democratic elders helped heal her wounds.
“The hurt’s gone away,” Thiel said Thursday as she prepared to take in Clinton’s acceptance speech at a watch party in downtown Atlanta. “You can’t cut off the nose to spite your face.”
A volunteer army
It’s not hard to be skeptical. Democrats have predicted the same upheaval every other November, betting that changing demographics that are adding more minorities to the voting rolls can put them over the top.
And with each vote Republicans further consolidated their power, sweeping every statewide office and winning commanding victories in the state Legislature. Soon, Gov. Nathan Deal will have a majority of the appointments on the state’s top court as well.
But adding Trump to the mix has many conservatives worried that his divisive comments could turn off independents — and Democrats praying he’s the answer to their electoral problems.
The signs that Republicans are ramping up their efforts for what could be a close contest in Georgia are everywhere. Polls, even by conservative firms, are showing a tightening race. Trump’s Georgia operation is planning to double its fulltime staff of three staffers within weeks.
And in a sure-fire signal that Republicans are worried about the Trump effect on down-ticket races, the Georgia GOP has stepped up its attacks on Jim Barksdale, the little-known Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate who has pumped $3 million of his own fortune into his campaign to oust Johnny Isakson.
Even the ever-optimistic chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, said he’s particularly worried about Arizona and Georgia, two states with sharply rising populations of Hispanic voters. And veteran Georgia activists acknowledge that this anything-can-happen election season could upend the state.
“In this most unusual, nontraditional election cycle, states typically reliable as red or blue for decades are in play. And I would include Georgia in that list,” said Scott Johnson, a Marietta Republican. “It won’t be automatic” for his party, he added.
Holding back
So far, the Clinton campaign hasn’t shown its cards on Georgia. Her last campaign visit came before she won the state’s March 1 primary, and neither candidate has reserved significant airtime in Atlanta or other major Georgia markets.
States that are on Clinton’s battleground map will know it. Marshall, the top Clinton operative in Georgia, said the campaign’s 2016 map looks much like the 2012 map, with a focus on Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Pennsylvania, a traditionally Democratic state that Trump hopes to flip, has been flooded by several hundred Clinton staffers and inundated with visits by both candidates and TV ads from all sides. Asked specifically whether Georgia could get a taste of the Pennsylvania treatment, Marshall demurred.
President Barack Obama did not pay for television ads in the state during his 2012 re-election campaign, Marshall noted, and Obama still lost the state by 8 percentage points. Georgia, he suggested strongly, does not yet appear to be a part of the plan despite the pleas from leading state Democrats that it should be.
“If you look at the demographics of Georgia, we are further ahead of where North Carolina was at this time in 2008,” Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams said of the Tar Heel State, which Obama narrowly won in 2008 — and narrowly lost four years later. “The difference between Georgia going blue and North Carolina going blue in ’08 is simply one of investment.”
False sense of security?
Republicans are gearing up. Trump’s campaign plans to hire at least three additional staffers in the Peach State, and his organizers are stitching together a plan to reactivate the offensive launched before Georgia’s primaries that helped the businessman win the bulk of the state’s delegates back in March.
Ryan Caudelle, Trump’s Georgia field organizer, is putting together a team of dozens to knock on doors in Atlanta’s vote-rich suburbs and hundreds more for phone bank duty to reach voters in more remote parts of the state.
Partisans on both sides know this contest will be a litmus test of whether Georgia’s changing electorate has trickled down to the voting booths. More than one-third of the state’s registered voters are minorities, and Democrats hope to win the bulk of them — so long as they cast a ballot.
“A lot of people haven’t grasped the real competitive nature of Georgia statewide elections,” said pollster Mark Rountree of Landmark Communications, who said there’s a “false sense of security” among Republicans. His latest survey, commissioned last week by Channel 2 Action News, showed Clinton and Trump in a dead heat in Georgia.
Throw in the contingent of Never Trump voters, galvanized by Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s dramatic plea in Cleveland to “vote your conscience,” and Democrats hope they have a chance to entice wavering independents to vote for Clinton — or at least persuade Trump skeptics to stay home.
“A whole lot of people have reflexively said they are part of the Republican Party and are realizing that for years, this Republican Party has not been representing their values,” said Leonard Presberg of Fayetteville, a Democrat who has made the same pitch to his friends. “Donald Trump brings that to the forefront.”
Georgia Democrats struggle with their own problems. An internal debate has long raged over whether the party needs to sharpen its appeal to minorities or tailor its message to moderate whites. Top Democratic leaders are constantly feuding. Some Sanders supporters, whose flock includes many first-time voters, remain disillusioned with Clinton.
“I really want to believe in this party, I want to believe so much that I have come to work with our wonderful people to try to turn Georgia blue,” said Khalid Kamau, a Sanders supporter from Atlanta still struggling with Clinton. “I think that we have been in such a rush to appear united for television that we haven’t done the work to be united behind closed doors.”
Others acknowledge that Trump’s comments, though sometimes inflammatory, have struck a nerve. Sure, Trump is a “walking media gift” to Democrats because of his say-anything candor, said Will Fowlkes of Kennesaw.
But, he added, “if you put so much salt on something, they get used to the taste.”
No ‘Door No. 3’
For all the recent polls showing a close race — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution plans to publish the results of its own survey next week — some see a familiar pattern.
Take the race in 2014, when Gov. Nathan Deal and David Perdue faced wellfunded Democratic challengers. Polls in July and August showed a tightening race, and millions of dollars from outside groups flooded the state. By November, though, independents and undecideds broke to the GOP — and Deal and Perdue won by comfortable margins.
There are signs of that inevitable creep already playing out in Georgia. Bobby Booth, a Cobb County conservative, said two weeks ago that he would refuse to vote for Trump — or Clinton for that matter — under any circumstances. “I am looking for Door No. 3,” he said.
But after a week in Cleveland — and a few days of watching the Democratic bash — he changed his tune.
“Regardless of Mr. Trump’s past, I believe those who are truly concerned for this country will vote Republican,” Booth said. “I, myself, have had to come to this reality.”