Georgia Democrats fail to gain ground in state Legislature
November 5, 2008 at 1:14 pm by Ken Edelstein in NewsGeorgia’s Democratic state legislators may be the only members of their party who failed to hitch a even a short little ride on Obama’s coattails.
The Republican edge in the state House of Representatives looks to drop from 34 seats to a 33 or 32 seat margin. Whoopie.
No incumbent state senators lost and Republicans look set to hold onto their 34-22 margin.
Republicans actually look as if they’ll defeat to incumbent Democratic legislators. Longtime Rep. Jeannette Jamieson of Toccoa is one of the casualties. She deserved to lose after it was revealed that she wasn’t paying some taxes — and she’s an accountant.
The other Democratic incumbent who lost appears to be North Georgia’s Charles Jenkins (although all the votes aren’t in from that contest, which remains close).
The Republican incumbents who lost include Steve “Thunder” Tumlin (a recent Golden Sleaze Award winner), who was beaten by Democrat Pat Dooley. Dooley had held the seat before, and demographic changes have made the Marietta district more favorable to her party.
And Republican incumbent John Heard was beaten by John Thompson in a Gwinnett districts that Democrats targeted because it’s more diverse.
In the 95th District (split between Gwinnett, Newton and Rockdale counties), an open seat was taken easily Toney Collins. It had been held by moderate Republican Robbie Mumford, who quit the rapidly trending Democratic district rather than switching parties.
Another race, in Macon’s 140th District, is pretty close to dead even, with Democrat James “Bubber” Epps 117 votes ahead of incumbent Allen Freeman.
f Epps holds on, Democrats will have gained two whole seats in the House. Whoopie.
Nothing could better demonstrate the weak Democratic showing than two DeKalb districts that seemed ripe for a Democratic takeover. With 17 or 18 precincts reporting, Republican incumbent Jill Chambers was beating back challenger Chris Huttman, who’s said he ran after he saw that Democrats hadn’t recruited someone for the seat. People apparently were so unexcited about the choices that Chamblee/Doraville district attracted close to the lowest turnout of any contests House election in the state.
In the neighboring 80th district, which straddles I-85 just inside the Perimeter, party-switching incumbent Mike Jacobs easily handled Michelle Conlon. Conlon entered the race after the original Democratic candidate was forced off the ballot for residency reasons.
The 67-33 margin wasn’t surprising because GOP Secretary of State Karen Handel wouldn’t let Democrats reopen qualifying, which forced Conlon to run as an independent. But the fact that Democrats weren’t able to line up a candidate to take on a party switcher in a Democratic-leaning district says that the Georgia party was caught flatfooted.
Scott Henry contributed to this report.
November 5th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Further hampering Conlon’s efforts was the fact that Handel’s strained or partisan or dare i say imoral rulings throwing out Conlon’s petitions prevented her from gearing up a campaign since by the time a judge overturned Handel’s lame attempts there were not many weeks left until the election.
Chambers stood up to the republican’s and unlike Jacobs tried to protect the interests of her constituents in DeKalb regarding the Dunwoody theft of the Perimeter Center Commercial Tax Base. So i’d have to say she’s more of a Maverick than Palin.
BTW its sad what some of the DeKalb republicans are trying to do to her. They need to grow up.
November 5th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Creative Loafing misstates the circumstances regarding Michelle Conlon’s petition.
It was the DeKalb County Board of Voter Registration and Elections that found Conlon’s petition to contain too few valid signatures. Handel merely upheld the Board’s finding of fact.
Additionally, CL, like the Democratic activists, like to think that HD 80 is some kind of Democratic stronghold, in the face of facts.
Jim Martin won this district as the nominee for LG two years ago, and it’s close to being truly his home turf.
But demographic tides continue to make this district increasingly Republican, to the extent that it went for McCain over Obama and chose Chambliss over homeboy Jim Martin.
Finally, CL says that the Democrats weren’t able to line up a candidate.
But the Democratic powers that be actually dissuaded Michelle Conlon from qualifying as a Democrat, instead favoring the ill-fated Keith Gross, who turned out not to have lived in Georgia long enough to be a candidate.
The fairy tale the GDP and CL are telling about how they lost this race is a shoddy attempt to coverup the Party’s failure to check the background of a slick con-man candidate who promised to self-fund.
The real tragedy is that the Democratic leadership was conned by a pretty face into bypassing a candidate who might have been a real threat to Jacobs.
But now, Conlon has been fined three times by the State Ethics Commission and faces an investigation into further allegations of campaign impropriety.
Put a fork into Conlon. She’s done.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:14 am
We’ll agree with you, Salt, on at least one major point: The Democrats were lousy at IDing vulnerable seats and recruiting competitive candidates. Mike makes a tough-to-beat incumbent, but you’d think the Dems would have more interest in taking him down than they showed. But the real shame is that there’ll be people returning to the Gold Dome who have no business being down there – and the minority party made little effort in going after them.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
[...] lost amid the shuffle of the presidential race and a handful of legislators losing seats were the various referenda (or referendums, for non-English majors) that appeared on local ballots. [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
In my race, I faced nearly $200,000 of communication in a district where only about 10,000 people vote. About half of it was positive and about half of it was negative. On the other hand, myself and the Democratic party probably spent close to $70,000 almost all of it negative. So there was a two-sided story about Jill but really only one side of the story about me. If 1 out of 20 voters had voted differently (or some Obama voters hadn’t left after voting for Obama) thing would have turned out differently.
Jill Chambers is endorsed by Georgia Equality and other GLBT groups because she voted against the gay marriage amendment in 2004. However, she has barely mentioned this in one of her campaigns and this year attacked me saying that I thought Vernon Jones was quote a “great” CEO based on me saying that Vernon should be commended for giving domestic benefits to gays and lesbians who work for DeKalb County. Some hero to the movement Jill is.
As for Jacobs seat — I do not think McCain beat Obama in this district or that we can say that one way or the other at this point. DeKalb County does not report the results separately by district for the early and absentee voters, and HD 80 had over 7,000 ballots cast this way and just like everywhere else in the state the absentee ballots leaned heavily Democratic. In my own race, I think I got something like 42% of the precinct voters, a little over 50% of the early/absentee voters and that combined for about 45.4% total.
Here are the precinct totals for McCain and Obama in District 80:
McCain 5,219
Obama 5,091
That’s 49.4% of the two-way vote for Obama. In these precincts, Obama’s share of the two way vote was 17.8% higher than Conlon’s and Conlon’s final vote was 1% higher than her vote in the precincts. My guess is also that Conlon suffered severe drop-off among early Democratic voters who didn’t know anything about her (or that she was supported by Democrats) because her campaign got off to such a late start. So if you assume that Obama outperformed Conlon by 17.8% among all voters (just like the precinct voters) that would actually put Obama’s percentage of the Obama+McCain votes in the district at 50.4% which in my definition is a win for Obama.
Of course, all of this could be settled much more easily if DeKalb County reported early and absentee votes on a precinct by precinct basis like Gwinnett does. I would also remind the previous poster that Kerry lost District 80 with about 49% in 2004 so at the very least it is not getting “more Republican” and the evidence is actually that it’s gotten slightly more Democratic.
Now all caveats aside, districts in the range of approximately 45%-55% for one party or the other are very hard to dislodge an incumbent in especially in a place like Georgia where it is difficult for members of both parties who are not incumbents to raise money and where the status quo heavily invests in maintaining the status quo.
4 of the 6 changes in party in the state house on Tuesday (Jenkins, Jamieson, Heard and Mumford) occured in districts where McCain got well over 65% (and a Democrat lost) or Obama got well over 55% in (and a Republican lost).