Georgia could become Obama battleground
June 20, 2008 at 1:58 pm by Scott Henry in News
Georgia had Obamamania so bad before Super Tuesday that the O-man put the Peach State in his “win” column weeks ahead of the primary and sent his campaign ops to work in other places.
There’s a big difference in this GOP-friendly state, however, between winning among Democrats and beating a Republican in the November election. But lately folks have been questioning much more seriously whether Georgia could swing for Barack Obama.
Earlier this week, Time magazine ran a story headlined “Can Georgia Be Obama’s Ohio?” which reveals that the Obama camp has selected Georgia and Virgina as potential battleground states and is dedicating workers and resources in an effort to gain ground here:
Obama has 15 full-time paid staffers who have been in Georgia for over a month. They also have had staff in North Carolina and Virginia and have been “literally moving in dozens of people every week to all three states,” said Jon Carson, Obama’s national field director. They also expect to have staff in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana before the end of the month. “It’s very hard to sit here right now to say what’s going to happen in November… Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana, North Dakota, Missouri — which of those is going to be most winnable? So our campaign is taking the approach of casting a wide net.”
It may be working. Yesterday, InsiderAdvantage released a new poll that shows Obama trailing John McCain by a single point – 43 percent to the Republican’s 44 percent – helped mightily by the Libertarian candidacy of hometown boy Bob Barr, with 6 percent.
As InsiderAdvantage CEO Matt Towery explains it:
Georgia is competitive for Obama for several reasons. First, it has a high African-American voting age population (VAP). Second, it has an unusually high percentage of younger voters (18-29). Both of these groups are more in the Obama camp, with black voters already at the 83 percent level and likely to climb.
Equally important, like its neighbor Florida, Georgia has a high percentage of voters who consider themselves independent. Obama is carrying that critical swing vote by about 10 percent in the poll.
If this trend continues it could make things very interesting come fall.
(Photo by Joeff Davis)
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June 20th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Talk of Georgia being in play is all the rage. We’ll see.