Folks,
I'm ecstatic that Jim Martin has managed to close this race up enough to get front page attention here on Kos. The support from Orange to Blue has been incredible - in just three days, more than 900 donors gave over $35k to Jim's campaign. That has almost doubled his total raised with a few of us ragtag local bloggers exhorting home and national audiences to please pay attention to what is going on in Georgia.
Georgia and North Carolina seem to be on the edge of a true return of the national Democratic Party to the South. I'm quite sure that this particular fellow is a little embarrassed right now.
So, what do I mean about Martin leading a new Blue South? Well, follow me down below:
First of all, check out the current Senate map. Lots of purple and blue around the map. Four major regions are solidly red: the Mountain West, where people like government out of their lives except to bring water; Texas and a couple of states north of it; the soon to be very lonely holdouts in New Hampshire and Maine, and the Deep South.
In Georgia, it has been said that Sonny Perdue, our current governor, is the first Republican to run the state since Reconstruction. Well, that is and is not true to some extent. At least in the state legislature, the so-called Democratic one-party rule has actually been a lot more of a Dixiecrat rule. When the state finally flipped a few years ago, there was a rush of "Democrats" to switch parties over to the majority, now that they didn't have to wear false names to wield committee power. This is a probably a simplification, but a lot of "Democrats" from this state would not be recognized as such out on the coasts.
Democrats in conservative districts have been an interesting blend: conservative social, somewhat populist financially (which is why the Cobb County / Bob Barr Republicans are going crazy over Chambliss and Perdue attempting to at least feign responsibility during our financial crisis), and masters of a certain racial calculus. The key has been to carry the black vote while splitting the white deeply enough to retain control.
A good approximation for this dynamic can be seen here (warning, long load time and you may have to force the script to keep running - it's my own state house district map). Click on the "Draw all GGA house districts" to do the display.
There is one major exception to this rule, which is below.
The Deep South area is actually home to a major, growing creative class region that is sometimes called "Char-lanta." Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta, Durham, and many other cities in this megaregion form a belt of creatives that are highly educated, socially tolerant, and community-minded. In other words, the exact type of people that the modern Republican party has told to take a hike. Bush's (and now McCain's) Rovian campaign style is doing to Republicans in these areas what LBJ predicted the Civil Rights Act would do to Democrats in all of the South. I don't know much about Kay Hagan, but she and Jim Martin both stand upon the endpoints of this particular belt.
As Kos himself has explained, Martin is truly a unique candidate in the South. He holds progressive values (friendly to the gay community in Georgia, cares about health care, and supported by local womens' groups) in a conservative state. Further, he provides the antidote to social wedge issues in a very strong belief in economic fairness.
For example, he has gone after the bailout bill's passed form as a handout to Wall Street at a time that Main Street has been all-too-neglected by the financial wizards and Masters of the Universe in the trading houses. When asked what he wanted from a rescue plan, he responded with this:
Democrat Jim Martin wants payments to mortgage borrowers rather than investment companies, which is not in the current package and isn’t likely to be. Martin also wants consumer protections against predatory lending and aggressive credit card tactics, which he says "triggered much of the crisis." And he doesn’t think commercial and investment banks should be permitted to merge.
That list sentence is a huge one - part of what got is into this mess. It is not the crashing stock market that really has us by the shorts (although a lot of us will be collateral damage via 401k's if retirement is near), it is the credit freeze. It is the real economy we are trying to preserve - you know, borrowing money to buy equipment to make stuff.
Here is Jim on the practices of predatory lenders, which were a big part of the subprime mess (I'm going to lump those flip-houses-to-get-rich-quick schemes on late night infomercials into this category).
Note that the above ad was cut in 2006 ... Jim has the judgment to see these kinds of things coming. When he was in the state house, he worked to do something about them as well.
The reason that Jim Martin is the key to the Blue South, is that he is a progressive in one of the Southern states that is most susceptible to the Democratic wave. Thanks to the creative class stronghold in Atlanta and the presence of the Black Belt, there is enough base support for Democrats to make Jim's win possible if he can get enough Independents. The messages that those independents are found to be responsive to will form the template for future candidates in the South that are not on such relatively friendly footing.
I want to thank everyone in safe blue states that have contributed to my little corner of ActBlue as I wrote my diaries. Now that the O2B for Jim is up, feel free to contribute there or to my own little pot.
Thanks, and hopefully we can get that much closer to 60 while cracking open the South just a little. National mandate, here we come!