Obama Campaign Wrong on Georgia

Today's New York Times contains an article entitled, "Obama Camp Thinks Democrats Can Rise in South." Author Robin Toner notes,

Officials in Mr. Obama’s campaign say they are bullish on the South, and they have signaled their aggressiveness with early campaign appearances in North Carolina and Virginia, major voter registration drives in the region, and television advertising in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

Senator Obama's campaign has long made similar claims. It is true that Obama's fortunes in Virginia have substantially improved in the last several weeks. While Obama may be competitive in Virginia and Florida, his campaign's efforts to portray him as competitive in other southern states (like Georgia) are flawed. Below, I specifically take aim at his campaign's comments about Georgia and explain why their analysis of the state is highly flawed.


Virginia aside, Obama's fortunes in other Southern states are more tenuous. The article quotes Steve Hildebrand (Obama's deputy campaign manager) as seeing "tremendous potential" in many Southern states. While Obama may do better than Al Gore or John Kerry across the board, it is unlikely that he'll be competitive across the south.

The foundation of the Obama campaign's strategy is increasing black voter turnout and voter registration. Since past Democrat presidential candidates have routinely received nearly 100% of the black vote and Democrats have always focused on turning out black voters, the only real way for Obama to boost his performance would be to register many more black voters.

The article claims that as many as 600,000 black voters may remain unregistered in Georgia. While I think this number is probably too high, let's assume it's true. If all of these black voters registered and 95% voted for Obama, Obama would net 570,000 votes.

The problem? In 2004, George W. Bush won Georgia by 548,105 votes! Thus, even if Senator Obama's campaign managed to register nearly every black resident in Georgia, he would still barely win (assuming John McCain mirrors George W. Bush's performance from 2004).

Realistically, Obama is not going to come close to registering all of Georgia's 600,000 unregistered black residents. Even if he registered half and received all of their votes, Obama still needs to close a gap of 250,000 votes. As the NY Times article notes, Democrat Presidential candidates typically do very poorly in the South. Since Senator Obama is no more moderate than Vice President Al Gore or Sen. John Kerry, it is unlikely that he will be able to overcome this gap among southern conservatives.

Additionally, Georgia has been one of the most Republican states in the country in recent election cycles. In 2006, a very bad year for the GOP, Georgia easily re-elected Gov. Sonny Perdue. In the the House race in GA-8, GOP challenger Mac Collins came within 2% of defeating incumbent Democrat Rep. Jim Marshall. In, GA-12, GOP challenger Max Burns came within 1,000 votes of defeating incumbent Rep. John Barrow. While Rep. Marshall's district is conservative and leans toward the GOP (Bush won 61% in 2004), Rep. Barrow's district is much tighter (Gore won the district in 2000, and Kerry lost the district by less than 3000 votes).

PS. You may ask, "What about Bob Barr?" So far, there is little reason to believe that Barr will garner a significant percentage of the vote in any state, including Georgia. Third-party candidates always poll better at this stage of a campaign than they do in November. In a close race - which is very likely in this election cycle - voters are far less likely to vote for a third-party candidate. For now, I believe Barr's impact will be negligible.

UPDATE: Today, Rasmussen released a new poll of Georgia, showing McCain with a 10% lead over Obama (51%-41%). Bob Barr only received 1% in this poll. These poll results confirm my suspicions discussed above.