After Georgia primary, word of the day is ‘outsider’
"Now you've got two outsiders talking about Washington, and now you get down to the issues.” So said David Perdue as he declared victory over 11-term U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston in Tuesday’s Republican senatorial primary runoff in Georgia. Perdue, a self-financing multimillionaire, took 51 percent of the vote in a hotly contested, nine-week battle that saw the candidates and outside groups spend upwards of $11 million.
“Outsider” Perdue is the cousin of former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, and the former CEO of Reebok, Dollar General and failed textile concern Pillowtex.
The other air-quotes outsider is Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn, the daughter of four-term Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn. She has also made a name for herself as CEO of the multi-million dollar Points of Light Foundation, a national charity inspired by President George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light” speech and chaired by his son, Neil Bush.
Perdue’s win will be billed as another triumph for insurgent tea party Republicans, but the fact is that conservative “outsider” (there’s that bequoted word again!) support was split in this race. Kingston ran with $2.3 million of advertising from establishment stalwart the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but he also received an endorsement from the May primary’s so-called tea party candidate, Karen Handel, and other tea party leaders.
Perdue touted the backing of former GOP presidential contender Herman Cain.
The freakishly long Republican runoff campaign was widely seen as a benefit to Nunn, who spent the interregnum fundraising and running largely positive image ads, while saving a good chunk of her campaign kitty for the general election.
That added to Democrats’ hopes in Georgia, already seen as a rare bright spot in what is expected to be a difficult midterm cycle. Democrats hold a 55 to 45 edge in the Senate, but several Dem-held seats are considered vulnerable in November. A Democratic pickup in of the Georgia seat, now held by retiring GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss, would make Republicans’ road to a Senate Majority much more difficult.
Putting the Dem in demographics
Democrats had already been feeling good about their chances in the Peach State. Nunn, considered a centrist with a well-known centrist Dem dad, is expected to benefit from a demographic shift as noteworthy as any in the country:
Since 2000, the white share of registered voters in Georgia has fallen to 59 percent, from 72 percent. That’s mainly because of demographic change — the white share of eligible voters has fallen to 60 percent from 68 percent over the same period.
What makes this decline particularly helpful for Democrats is that 48 percent of the newly eligible nonwhite voters are black. (Hispanics make up a larger share of newly eligible nonwhite voters elsewhere in the country, and blacks typically vote Democratic in larger proportion.) Over the past decade, Georgia’s pool of eligible black voters grew by nearly 600,000, compared with about 375,000 newly eligible white voters. Some of this is because of generational change, but many new black voters have moved from expensive northeastern cities to growing middle-class suburban communities on the south side of Atlanta.
Partly thanks to voter registration drives ahead of President Obama’s election in 2008, there have been 500,000 new black voters — and almost 1 million non-whites in total — added to the Georgia rolls since 2000. That is nearly ten times the number of new white voters added in the same period. And that now makes Georgia one of the few states few states where “a larger percentage of eligible nonwhite voters is registered than eligible white voters.”
Obama still lost Georgia by 8 points in 2012, but that was because he did worse among white voters than any Democrat since George McGovern in 1972. The simple and slightly tawdry truth is that Michelle Nunn is expected to do much better.
There is an old saying in politics: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. The GOP is already well on its way to holding up its end of the saw — Kingston used his concession speech to heartily endorse Perdue — but it remains to be seen whether Nunn can wow enough African Americans and woo enough suburban white voters to rewrite this red state’s political playbook.
There are two other variables in this equation: Amanda Swafford, who will be on the November ballot on the Libertarian line, and expected mountains of outside (or should we say “outsider?”) campaign cash. Super PACs and other technically unaffiliated groups have already spent $8 million in this race.
As for getting down to those issues, well … expect to hear more about who is more of an outsider, but also expect Perdue-friendly groups to continue attacking Nunn for her support of the ACA, trying to link her closely with Obama. Nunn, for her part, is poised to play the other side of that coin, as the rapidly growing reach of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision has again made a GOP “war on women” fertile ground for Democratic candidates.
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