Some more good news on this Friday:
http://www.wsbtv.com/...
Jack Kingston holds an edge over David Perdue just days before the Republican primary runoff, but both men trail their potential Democratic opponent, according to a new Channel 2 Action News poll.
The Landmark Communication poll conducted on July 16 shows Rep. Jack Kingston with 48 percent of the vote and businessman David Perdue with 41 percent. The poll of 1720 likely voters has a margin of error of 2.4 percent.
Kingston’s lead is even larger outside metro Atlanta where he has an 11 point advantage over Perdue. However in metro Atlanta, Kingston and Perdue are dead even.
The poll also found both men trail Democrat Michelle Nunn in a potential November showdown.
Nunn leads Kingston by 8 percent and Perdue by 5 percent when voters were asked who they would chose if the general election were to take place today. - WSB-TV Atlanta 2, 7/18/14
Now I know some of you have been cynical about Landmark's polling on this race and the Governor's race but I will say that the runoff poll isn't that different from the latest Insider Advantage poll:
http://mdjonline.com/...
According to a poll released Thursday, U.S. Senate candidate Jack Kingston has a 4.5 percent lead over his runoff opponent, David Perdue.
The poll was conducted July 15 and 16, and randomly selected and surveyed 696 individuals who voted in the May 20 primary. Conducted by InsiderAdvantage for the MDJ, Fox 5 and Morris News, the poll is weighted for age, race and gender — meaning the respondents’ answers are given more or less importance in order to reflect the demographics of the voting public.
According to the poll, 45.6 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Kingston if the election were held today, while 41.1 percent responded they would vote for Perdue; 13 percent were undecided.
The poll has a margin of error of 3.7 percent; this means Kingston’s lead could be as large as 8.2 percent or as little as 0.8 percent.
Matt Towery, CEO of InsiderAdvantage, believes Kingston has solidified his lead in all age groups except senior voters.
“One of the questions is at what level will senior voters turn out,” Towery said.
Read more: The Marietta Daily Journal - Jack Kingston carries slight edge over David Perdue in InsiderAdvantage poll. - Marietta Daily Journal, 7/17/14
This truly has been one nasty runoff:
http://www.economist.com/...
Mr Perdue is an ex-boss of Reebok, a maker of sports kit, and Dollar General, a discount store. He has never held elected office before. Mr Kingston is a career politician, having served in Congress since 1993. Mr Perdue portrays himself as something fresh and his rival as a cobwebbed incumbent. “If you like what is going on in Washington, then vote for my opponent,” he tells crowds.
That opponent paints himself as a faithful public servant, dedicated to his district in Savannah (to which he says he returns every weekend). Mr Kingston chides his multimillionaire adversary for being “out of touch”. In a televised debate on July 13th he sneered: “You live inside a gate inside a gated community with a gate on your house. I think being a public servant is being public and knowing how to serve.”
Mr Perdue refuses to apologise for his wealth and success. When Mr Kingston boasted of his role in a public project to deepen the port of Savannah, he shot back that the congressman had taken “17 years to deepen this port five feet” and scoffed: “In the real world you would have been fired for that and here you want a promotion.”
Nonetheless, the polls favour Mr Kingston. Despite Mr Perdue’s pedigree, the Chamber of Commerce backs the congressman. Its political director, Rob Engstrom, says Mr Kingston’s past efforts to slash spending and create jobs explain why. He adds that the congressman has never voted for a tax increase.
The owner of Redneck Gourmet, an eatery in Newnan, has played host to both candidates, but is unconvinced by either: “As a small-business owner I look out for the things that are going to help me,” he says. A customer, Melinda Mansour, reckons that Mr Perdue’s inexperience “is the best thing he’s got going for him.” But he is not exactly an outsider: his cousin, Sonny Perdue, was Georgia’s previous governor.
Mr Kingston has run a bare-knuckle campaign, accusing his opponent of destroying jobs, scrounging federal dollars and favouring tax hikes, and generally trying to make the Perdue family sound like the Georgia Borgias. Factcheck.org, a watchdog, criticises one Kingston ad for making “multiple misleading claims” about Mr Perdue’s time as boss of Pillowtex, a textiles firm that went bust in 2003. A voter in Woodstock says she abandoned Mr Kingston because of his “nasty” campaign ads.
The congressman has a scandal of his own: a donation of $80,000, linked to a Palestinian felon facing deportation. Phyllis Maybern, from Cartersville, says she won’t vote for him because of it. Mr Perdue, meanwhile, faces difficult questions about his time at the Georgia Ports Authority. A trucking company he bought two years ago with his well-known cousin won contracts at Savannah’s port while Mr Perdue served on the Ports Authority’s board. Moreover, he was appointed to the post (a “sweetheart deal” , says Mr Kingston), by Governor Perdue. - The Economist, 7/19/14
And it all will come to an end next Tuesday and then the real race will begin. Nunn will have to get to the 50% mark to avoid a runoff in the general election and one key constituency could help her win:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act unleashed a wave of new laws with a disparate impact on black voters, including cuts in early voting and photo-identification requirements.
These laws will disenfranchise an unknown number of eligible voters, but probably not so many as to have a big effect on election results. In Georgia, where a voter ID law has been in place since 2007, the black turnout rate has increased to nearly match that of whites.
The post-Jim Crow era also led to the end and eventual reversal of the Great Migration, the exodus of blacks from the South to escape racist laws and seek better economic opportunities. The South was home to about 90 percent of the nation’s African-Americans until the beginning of the 20th century. By 1970, 53 percent of blacks lived there.
This trend reversed in the decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, 57 percent of black Americans live in the South; more than one million black Southerners today were born in the Northeast.
Nowhere has the remigration done more to improve Democratic chances than in Georgia, where Democrats have a chance to win an open Senate seat this November. Since 2000, as the black population has risen, the share of registered voters who are white has dropped to 59 percent, from 72 percent.
The Democratic nominee in Georgia is Michelle Nunn, a candidate symbolic of generational change in her own right. She is the daughter of Sam Nunn, a conservative Democratic former senator from rural, downstate Georgia who was first elected in 1972. If Ms. Nunn wins this November, it will be with only a handful of the rural, Southern white voters who adored her father.
The state’s growing black population will give her a chance to win with less than one-third of the white vote, a tally that would have ensured defeat for Democrats just a few years ago. Her pathway to victory would be unrecognizable to her father, who never won re-election with less than 80 percent of the vote. - New York Times, 7/18/14
Nunn has been putting together a grassroots army of female and youth voters and Atlanta Mayor Kassim Reed (D. GA) and Civil Rights legend, Rep. John Lewis (D. GA), have been determined to help get African American voters out to the polls for Nunn. Perdue would be more of a challenge but still beatable but it's looking like Kingston is the one we want to beat and we just might get our wish next Tuesday. Until then, click here to donate and get involved with Nunn's campaign:
http://www.michellenunn.com/