Political Eyes Watch Tuesday Run-Off In Georgia
His Democratic opponent, Jim Martin, is facing an uphill battle based on early voting indicators. (Early voting began 19 November.) Both Bill Clinton and Al Gore have campaigned for Martin in Georgia.
Democrats have picked up seven Senate seats this election cycle, increasing their Senate majority to 58, the most held by Democrats since 1979-81. If Democratic candidates win in both Georgia and Minnesota, the Democratic Party will have a filibuster-proof majority, something that it has not had since 1977-79, when Democrats held 61 Senate seats.
In Minnesota, incumbent Republican freshman Senator Norm Coleman leads Democratic challenger Al Franken in the recount by less than 300 votes. The recount must be completed by Friday. Minnesota voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential race.
At issue in Minnesota: between 4 percent and 5 percent of all the absentee ballots cast were rejected in the initial count. Challenger Al Franken wants the absentee ballots revisited; Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman does not. The Franken campaign has hinted that it might challenge any decision that did not include counting these absentee ballots.
Turning back to Georgia, the last time the state held a U.S. Senate runoff was in 1992. In that contest, Sen. Wyche Fowler (D) polled more votes in the general election but subsequently lost to Republican Paul Coverdell in the runoff. In the current contest, it seems most likely that those voters casting Libertarian ballots would swing their votes to Chambliss, not Martin. Assuming that they show up to vote, of course.
And it's the "showing up" for a run-off that favors Chambliss. The state's black population turned out to vote in droves on November 4th -- 35 percent of the voters were black whereas the U.S. Census shows that only 29.9 percent of the state's population is black. However, current projections suggest that only about 23 percent of the run-off electorate will be black.
Chambliss is a freshman senator; he was elected in the 2002 mid-term elections, defeating Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam war hero and paraplegic. That was a nasty contest; Republicans ran a controversial ad linking Cleland to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.