The line was longish, about 20 deep. The unofficial parking lot bumper sticker poll was Obama 3, McCain 0.
In North Fulton County, Georgia, home of Newt Gingrich, home of Johnny Isakson, home of Tom Price and his infamous "truth" squad, change was in the air.
Local poll workers say that they expect a 20% jump in voting this election. New voters. Obama voters.
Touching the Diebold screen next to Obama/Biden felt really good (although, yes, less satisfying than punching a card, pulling a lever, or some other physical manifestation of democracy). I almost didn't worry that the machine wouldn't count my vote. Almost.
Early voting in Georgia started this past Monday, September 22, and will run through the election. From October 27 through October 31, additional voting centers will open for business.
The voter roles are swelling with new voters. As political stalwart Bill Ship notes in his column from Tuesday:
The fresh Georgia political map is likely to startle. Just since 2004, Georgia's registration rolls have grown by 577,000 new voters, a plurality of them black. Political observers believe an additional 300,000 new voters are yet to be processed and added to the rolls. Don't frown, Bubba. It will be OK. Trust me. Whites still hold a commanding majority of the vote (64.5 percent). However, their numbers have diminished by nearly 6 percent in just four years.
While Shipp concludes that Obama won't win, he predicts:
Even if Barack doesn't carry the Peach State, you may be shaken the morning after the Nov. 4 election. You will see the sun rise on the real new Georgia - a Georgia filling up with new voters and minority residents. The dramatic changes will be reflected in a record voter turnout.
Examples of how Georgia is turning blue from Shipp:
Suburban Cobb County, formerly the capital of Barry Goldwater Republicanism, has registered at least 28,000 blacks since 2004, and only 14,000 whites. Suburban Douglas County has registered 13,000 black voters and only 2,000 whites.
As the AP noted earlier this month,
The Democrats' biggest voter registration goal is in Georgia, where the Obama campaign hopes to register 500,000 voters before the election, said Dean, who has spent the past month traveling the country on a voter registration bus tour.
"The Obama folks are serious about Georgia," [Howard] Dean said. Georgia has added 337,000 voters since 2006, but the state does not identify them by party affiliation.
And it feels like change is in the air. At every public event - farmer's markets, fall festivals, art festivals, river cleanups, on and on and on, Obama campaign volunteers are out in force registering new voters.
McCain doesn't have a field office in Georgia.
More from Dean in Time Magazine:
"At the end of the day, some states are going to matter more than others," says Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "If our registration efforts go very well in Georgia, Georgia will be in play. If they don't go well, they won't be in play. The map is getting bigger for us, not smaller."
Georgia is another state in which the campaign once had very high hopes but is now unsure whether it should continue to invest in it. The campaign stopped advertising there before the conventions and last week redeployed some of its 75 staff to neighboring North Carolina — a southern state with a large African-American electorate that has seen one of the highest levels of voter registration this cycle, with more than 400,000 new voters on the rolls. If the campaign can register enough new voters in the Peach State — and it has already registered more than 300,000 in Georgia — then it believes that the state could still be in play, since former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr's libertarian candidacy could steal some of the Republican vote. Bill Clinton won Georgia in 1992 after Ross Perot drew a significant number of votes from George H.W. Bush. But for Obama to pull off a similar coup, he would need an increase in Democratic voters of at least 15% from 2004 — a whopping number that, even with an unprecedented 30 offices in the state, will be difficult to achieve.
(emphasis mine).
We've got a great, though underfunded Senate candidate in Jim Martin.
His latest add against Saxby Shameless is a good one, hitting the GOP on the economy, where it hurts:
We've got a grassroots campaign against Saxby Shameless, with its own YouTube Channel.
We've got local kook Bob Barr playing spoiler for McCain.
Maybe Obama's "pulling out" of Georgia because it's a lost cause. But the ground game is still alive and well. There may be fewer TV adds, but voter registration drives are still in effect.
This morning, as I pulled out of the parking lot with my shiny new "I'm a Georgia Voter" sticker on, two more cars sporting Obama 'o8 and Got Hope? bumper stickers pulled in.
Maybe, just maybe, the Peach State will turn blue this year.
UPDATE: I almost forgot to mention that Georgia music legends The Allman Brothers are playing at the Grateful Dead's Obama fundraising concert in Pennsylvania on October 13. They play Atlanta October 11, so hopefully they'll be in the political mood....