John Barrow is the member of Congress from Georgia's 12th district. That hasn't changed since 2004, when he was the only non-incumbent Democrat elected. However, the 12th district has been changed twice since he was elected. Come below the fold to learn what this means about this year's election.
The 12th CD was created after the 2000 Census at the behest of the then Majority Leader of the Georgia Senate, Charles Walker, a state senator from Augusta. It was explicitly designed to elect a Democrat. It combined liberal (for the state of Georgia) Athens, with Augusta and Savannah (African-American majority cities with strong party organizations.) In fact, the district was design for a specific candidate Walker's son, Champ. Unfortunately, Champ ran a very poor campaign, and a Republican, Maxie Burns, went to Washington.
Before the next election, Senator Walker was convicted of corruption charges, so Champ wasn't available to retrieve the seat. Instead there was a spirited Democratic primary with the ultimate winner, John Barrow, a county commissioner from Athens-Clark County. He went on to defeat Maxie Burns in the General Election that year.
Before the 2006 election, the Republicans used their newly acquired control of both houses of the Georgia legislature to redraw the 12th. This was following Tom Delay's playbook of mid-Census revisions for partisan advantage. Out went Athens and most of the northern portions of the district. The counties added were small, rural, and Republican. Maxie Burns was called out of cold storage at a Washington lobbying shop to contest the district.
The awesome powers of the Rove political machine were unleashed to dispossess John from the 12th. This included two different visits by President Bush to the district. Despite this full court press, John managed a squeaker victory by something less than 800 votes.
The elections of 2008 and 2010 (despite the Republican wave) were comparatively walks in the park. In fact, Barrow's biggest difficulty in those years was being primaried from the left. In 2010, this acquired a little national notoriety by being chronicled in the Huffington Post which cast the contest almost entirely in racial terms to the vast disservice of the district and the Democratic party.
After 2010 many of us thought that John had survived the worst that the Republicans could throw at him. However, we underrated the ingenuity of the leaders of the Georgia legislature. Once again they redrew the 12th. They now eliminated Savannah, where John had moved after his home in Athens was removed from the district. The replacement was another swath of rural counties in south and central Georgia. This redistricting clearly put him on the endangered list.
However, John was lucky and smart. He locked up advertising slots early. He had no primary this year so could devote his considerable fundraising talents to building a $1 million warchest. In addition, John has provided excellent constituent services, particularly to the large veteran population in the district.
The lucky part was his opponent, Lee Anderson. Anderson has been a state legislator and there are rumors that legislative leaders drew the district as they did so that he could run. Unfortunately for Lee, he faced a four-way primary and under Georgia law was forced into a run off election which delayed the start of his campaign and consumed most of the funds he had raised.
Anderson is also, to put it kindly, not very articulate. Recognizing his disadvantage in debating, he has ducked all organized debates. This lead to the spectacle of John Barrow standing on stage before an audience answering their questions without any possible rejoinder from Anderson. Anderson's pretext for avoiding the debate is he requires a public announcement by Barrow about who he is voting for and who he will support for Speaker of the House.
Outside spending has been heavy by both Republican and Democratic PACs. However, Anderson has been largely absent from the ad wars, while John's commercials have been extremely effective. Although they are also quite grating for liberal Democrats. John has also acquired a couple of endorsements that count as quite unusual for Democrats, since both the NRA and Chamber of Commerce have supported him.
All of this leads to the conclusion that John Barrow's prospects for reelection are significantly better than the conventional wisdom suggests. Some progressives will question whether John represents any sort of improvement over a Republican. This is flatly silly. In the best case, the House will be narrowly Democratic so every vote for Speaker will count. John can be counted on as a vote for Nancy Pelosi. To quote John in closing, "I'm a Democrat born, and a Democrat bred, and when I die, I'll be a Democrat dead!"