The latest round of polling has shown U.S. Senate candidate David Perdue as trailing opponent Michelle Nunn, and one of the biggest disparities lies with the female vote. Our poll released last week shows the Republican candidate trailing by just under 10% among women, while leading among men by 6.5%. Nunn has two obvious advantages as she courts the female vote; first, as a female candidate, she gets a major natural boost for natural reasons. Second, women tend to be more liberal than men, mainly due to those pesky women’s rights issues that have plagued the GOP in recent election cycles. While social issues haven’t played much of a role in the campaign here in Georgia to date, the Perdue camp still clearly believes they need to cut into Nunn’s lead among women if they hope to win in November, (or at least make sure they make it into the runoff).
And how do you court the female vote? The same way you court every other sort of vote – with TV spots. Enter two new ads by the Perdue campaign, both heavily featuring women who strongly support the Republican candidate’s platform.
And what better way to attract the support of moms across the state, (the single working woman demographic is not one that the Perdue campaign wants to waste time pursuing) than by releasing an ad starring momma Perdue?
Will these ads resonate more clearly than the standard Perdue fare that has seen the candidate lose his lead in the polls? With a clear target in mind, they at least seem more focused on making an impact.
Sunday Voting a Success in Georgia
A week after voters were allowed to cast their ballots during the weekend for the first time in Fulton County, they did the same in DeKalb, Athens-Clarke, Chatham, and Floyd, (as well as Fulton for the second time). The AJC reported that nearly 4,000 votes were cast in DeKalb, and a similar number were cast in Fulton. Those totals are up from last week, when only about 1,500 voters cast their ballots in Fulton.
As a state that has been under fire from the Left for making it difficult to vote, opening up weekend voting seems like a step in the right direction. While the fallout from the lawsuit filed against the Secretary of State’s office by the New Georgia Project probably will linger for some time, it’s hard to argue against giving people more opportunities to vote. It remains to be seen, however, how many of these weekend (poll) warriors were people who wouldn’t ordinarily vote, and how many were folks who would have voted anyway and were just seizing the opportunity to do so early.
Both parties were active over the weekend, getting in as much voter contact as possible before what promises to be an extremely close set of races on November 4th.
