Last night, Congressman Jim Marshall (GA-08)and Congressman John Barrow (GA-12) won their respective primary contests by overwhelming margins: Marshall with 86% and Barrow with 76% of the vote. Each carried every county in the district. And thank goodness they did win. Because retaining the seats in Congress for Dems is not just a priority for the DCCC, it is a priority for those who care about the health of the Democratic party in Georgia.
The purity purge advocated by some in the netroots community is not healthy for our party, particularly our party in the South. The fact is that there are Democrats of all ideological persuasions in our party. In our state, there happen to be a fair number of right-moderate to conservative Democrats, particularly in the rural areas of the state.
I, for one, am thankful that we have some Democrats who represent rural Georgians in Congress and who are winning seats with multi-racial coalitions of Democrats of all persuasions, conservative to liberal. Doesn't that make us stronger as a party, and more effective at coalition building and give us more hope when the Republican legislature tries to gerrymander seats in 2012? Congratulations to Congressmen Marshall and Barrow. Let's work toward their re-election.