More criticism of Obama’s Georgia strategy
September 15, 2008 at 10:04 am by Andisheh Nouraee in NewsNate Silver, who runs the awesomely nerdtastic political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, joined the chorus of campaign-watchers criticizing the Obama campaign for devoting millions of dollars to trying to win Georgia’s Electoral College votes.
According to Silver, Virginia and North Carolina are more Obama-friendly than Georgia. If he can put either of those states in his column, he wouldn’t need Georgia.
“[W]hile it was possible to conceive of a world in which Georgia went blue, it probably wasn’t going to turn blue before North Carolina, and it certainly wasn’t going to turn blue before Virginia.”
I think Silver is correct that Georgia was a bad investment for Obama, but I disagree with his implication that this was always the case.
Democrat Bill Clinton carried Georgia in 1992, and barely lost it in 1996, because third-party candidate Ross Perot ate into the Republican vote total here.
If Georgia Republican-turned-Libertarian Bob Barr had picked up some momentum during summer, he likely could have bitten into McCain’s total votes in Georgia.
Obviously, that hasn’t turned out to be the case. But it wasn’t pie-in-the-sky.
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