After wading into some of the more Mulder and Scully-esque theories about Obama's disappointing results in Georgia, I thought I'd offer a simple analysis of results, devoid of any Karen Handel's and her black helicopters flying into the Twin Towers and devouring a half-million vote kinds of rationale.
(Actually, if there are voting issues in GA, which wouldn't surprise me, I'm all for investigating. Let's just use real numbers and not projections, ok?)
Like many Obama supporters in Georgia, I was watching and hoping that Obama might pull out the Peach State this time. I knew it was a long shot...in fact, maybe the longest of the long shots for Obama, but he was doing well in several, so I was optimistic...
Until the call came. Bleechhh! It was a downer on an otherwise beautiful evening.
After waiting for the (almost) complete results, I began to sift through the actual numbers, not the projection of numbers, the actual numbers, county-by-county.
Obama did about as well as I thought in the Atlanta counties (Fulton, Dekalb, Clayton) and even did really well in the suburban counties to the north (Cobb, Gwinnett). He was good in the southwest, as expected, and in other smaller cities.
So what went wrong in GA? The answer lies in the white rural areas. I'll focus more on the north, which I know better, which is the strongest GOP part of the state and where I as a Fellow in the summer had hoped we could reduce the GOP lead a bit.
Unfortunately, we didn't. Our deficits in almost all north Georgia counties got larger instead.
(By North Georgia, I'm using the Obama campaign's north Georgia 20-county section. The counties are listed below. This includes most of the 9th and 11th Congressional Districts, and Cherokee County in the 6th District.)
Counties 2004 deficit 2008 deficit
Bartow 14,570 votes 16,300
Catoosa 10,599 12,190
Chattooga 2,189 2,973
Cherokee 43,411 47,914
Dade 2,545 3,090
Dawson 5,242 6,189
Fannin 4,135 5,193
Floyd 11,362 12,403
Gilmer 4,904 5,793
Gordon 7,643 8,821
Haralson 5,269 6,402
Lumpkin 4,599 5,731
Murray 4,846 5,157
Pickens 5,671 7,408
Polk 4,599 5,800
Towns 2,393 2,901
Union 4,520 5,521
Walker 9,354 11,007
White 5,387 6,292
Whitfield 12,364 11,058
NORTH DEFICIT 165,599 192,673
STATE DEFICIT 548,105 215,820
(Again, by "north" I'm using the Obama Campaign's 20 county north division. There are other "northern" counties not included here.)
As you can see, only one county, Whitfield, actually became slightly less red this year. We had a great office there with lots of volunteers and a growing Hispanic population and small A-A population.
The north is the strongest GOP region of the state. In 2004, we got drilled there, but it didn't matter...Kerry got drilled everywhere about Atlanta and SW Georgia (a few central Ga counties) in 2004.
This time though, as you can tell, this 20 county block made up almost the entire state deficit. Obama fought McCain pretty much to a draw everywhere else, and I bet if one where to do a similar analysis of the south-central counties in GA (also rural), McCain won those handily as well (not as much as these), but Obama won the rest of the state. Remember, GA has a LOT of small, rural counties.
I won't get into trying to figure out reasons for this yet, but I have a few suppositions:
- Sarah Palin did fire up the social conservative base, and that had an effect on north Georgia. I think we could have kept the deficit even in north Georgia without her on the ticket, and perhaps even shrunk it a little as initially planned, but her presence energized rural, social conservatives. In this case, I think Palin was a plus for McCain, and may have even won him the entire state.
- The state Democratic Party has all but abandoned the north, and pays little attention to it and provides little money for it. Their attitude seems to be leave those people alone. Again, that attitude didn't make much difference in 2004, it made a huge difference this time.
- There's little to no media outlets in the north (or much of rural America) that even tries to give a good representation of Democratic and progressive ideas, policies, and candidates. Guess what the overwhelming 24-hour network watched is?
Was race an issue? Yes, but Obama's actual vote numbers ended up being very similar to Kerry's. Several counties had percentages that went up, even though the vote deficit increased as well because GOP numbers also went up (growing population, energized social conservatives). So, I don't think race was an overwhelming issue. Racial prejudice combined with religious prejudice was worse...you know, Oh My God! He's black and has a funny name! Must be a Muslim...which in ignorant-speak means "Might be a terrorist."
You think there's not a reason why Sarah Palin started the "palin' around with terrorist" idea? She's an idiot on a lot of things, but she does have people smarts, and played rural crowds fears well.
I live in north Georgia, and I'm not giving up! I'm more determined now than ever that north Georgia develop their local Democratic parties. We have to, or else it could keep us from winning this state again in a year where we could have won it.