Recent polls show Jason Carter leading Nathan Deal in the race for governor, but demographics and recent statewide election results indicate that Carter still has an uphill climb. His best bet at pulling the upset may well be a December runoff. Statewide candidates in Georgia must receive one more vote than 50 percent to win a general election outright.
An electorate with its mind more on the winter holidays than on Georgia politics might create a low-turnout scenario in which anything could happen in a runoff.
Is there a precedent for this in recent memory? Yes and no. In 2008, incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss was forced into a general election runoff against Democrat Jim Martin, a comparative unknown.
In the general election, Chambliss won 49.8 percent to Martin’s 46.8 percent. The libertarian candidate won 3.4 percent of the vote – enough to play the spoiler. Chambliss then ran away with the runoff, besting Martin by 15 percent. But it was startling to see an incumbent Republican unable to get half of the votes in a regular general election.
Might the 2008 U.S. Senate election serve as a sort of blueprint for a Jason Carter upset? The answer is a definite maybe.
The key difference between the 2008 Senate race and the 2014 governor’s race is that 2008 was also a presidential election. Moreover, the Democratic presidential nominee was Barack Obama, an African-American. That boosted black, and therefore Democratic turnout hugely. This year isn’t a presidential election, of course. But keep in mind that having black Democratic nominees for secretary of state and attorney general almost certainly helped boost Democrat Roy Barnes to victory in the 1998 governor’s race.
Jason Carter has advantages that Jim Martin didn’t have. Carter, a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter, has an instant name ID and pseudo-celebrity status that Martin could only have dreamed of. And with this name ID comes the kind of financial backing – including out-of-state money – that Martin didn’t enjoy.
Moreover, a Democratic presidential candidate is about the only advantage missing for Carter on the statewide ticket in November. The ballot this year is chock-full of African-American Democratic candidates for several statewide offices. While none of these candidates is likely to excite the interest of a significant number of black voters, the cumulative influence of several on one ballot could make a difference in a close race. Carter likely would need about a 30 percent turnout among blacks to have a shot at winning outright in November, or forcing a runoff.
Then there’s Michelle Nunn. The Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate is bound to attract significant money to her campaign, if for no other reason than that her race is rightfully considered to be crucial in the fight for majority control of the Senate.
This is likely to create a ‘ticket effect’ for Carter, and for the added reason that Nunn is also a political legacy in Georgia. (Her father Sam was a popular U.S. senator.)
This intuitive ticket effect is born largely of Carter’s and Nunn’s last names. And focus groups reveal that the most likely voters to be swayed by such intuitive decision-making in politics are women, especially independent and undecided women. This is the other key demographic in the Carter-Deal race.
These undecided women may also be more apt to be swayed by non-partisan and non-policy factors in the race, such as Deal’s ethics issues, or even his perceived mishandling of the winter storm aftermath last winter.
Critical to the chances for a gubernatorial runoff this year is Libertarian candidate Andrew Hunt. He has openly said his realistic goal is not to win the Governor’s Mansion himself, but to force a runoff between Carter and Deal. At least one poll shows him with as much as 7 percent support. This is probably an inflated number, but recent electoral history in Georgia indicates that it probably would take only about 3.5 percent voter support for Hunt to potentially force a runoff. The libertarian won about 4 percent of the vote in the last gubernatorial race. On the other hand, the libertarian won only 2.7 percent of the vote in the 2010 reelection of U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson.
The final and perhaps biggest key to the Carter-Deal race will be voter intensity, which is another term for likely turnout. Nationally, while polls show that Republicans outpace Democrats in political zeal this year, the GOP’s advantage is about 5 percent less than it was in 2010, the last major, non-presidential election cycle.
Voters this year seem dismayed with their elected officials, but the public’s sour mood shows signs of manifesting itself less in an angry rush to the polls than in a curious throwing up of their hands. The net result of all this remains to be seen.
