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Georgia: Republican Perdue Wins Senate Seat Over Democrat Nunn

Georgia: Republican Perdue Wins Senate Seat Over Democrat Nunn

By Daniel Malloy and Aaron Gould Sheinin, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (MCT)

ATLANTA — Republican David Perdue, a businessman who was virtually unknown in political circles just 18 months ago, will be Georgia’s next United States senator.

The Fortune 500 CEO bested Democrat Michelle Nunn in a heated, tightly contested race that was by far the most expensive Senate contest in state history.

Perdue thanked the state’s voters for propelling him into the Senate without a runoff, as Libertarian Amanda Swafford did not pull away much of the vote.

“We took our message around the state, and it resonated and it worked,” Perdue said. “Because it was sincere. It was from the heart. More importantly, it was from your heart.

“And that’s what the people of this country and this state, that’s what they’re hearing tonight. But I want to remind you: Tonight we start a new journey to set a new course for America.”

As Perdue spoke, Fox News — projected on a large screen to his right — officially called the U.S. Senate to flip to Republican hands, prompting a raucous cheer and chants of “U.S.A.” from the crowd.

The GOP wave had washed through Georgia.

“We’ll get those 300 bills off of Harry Reid’s desk,” Perdue said, reprising a stump speech line about the outgoing majority leader stalling House-passed legislation. Perdue said an all-Republican Congress’ agenda should include corporate tax reform and tackling the long-term debt, along with addressing immediate crises like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Ebola.

Nunn told a disappointed crowd in downtown Atlanta that she called Perdue and “offered him my great congratulations.” But she said Democrats, who mounted the stiffest fight Republicans have faced in years, have much to be proud of.

“We have changed politics in Georgia,” she said. “Not just tonight. We’ve reminded people of what a two-party system looks like and a civil dialogue. We’ve lifted up and advocated issues that matter, whether it’s increasing the minimum wage, pay equity for women, bipartisan immigration reform.

“These are issues that we have lifted up and will continue to lift up.”

Democrats have much work to do, she said.

“We put Georgia in play,” Nunn said. “We built a foundation that needs to be cultivated, that needs to be built upon.”

A few miles away in festive Buckhead, the former CEO of Dollar General and Reebok laughed as he spoke of the long, strange trip that brought him to high office.

“Donors, some of you got the calls last year and the first words out of your mouth were ‘David, what are you thinking?'” Perdue said.

Perdue takes the place of U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, whose January 2013 retirement announcement launched a frenzied two years of campaigning.

At that point, Perdue and Nunn were political novices who had never sought office before, yet they carried famous names: Perdue’s cousin, Sonny, was a two-term governor and Nunn’s father, Sam, was a four-term U.S. senator.

The Democrat breezed through a primary against three underfunded foes. Perdue entered late against three sitting congressmen and Georgia’s former secretary of state, but backed by millions of dollars of his own money and an “outsider” image untainted by political baggage.

Perdue bested GOP establishment forces who lined up behind Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah in a nine-week Republican runoff. Then as soon as he won in July, the Nunn campaign and Democratic allies unloaded blistering attacks on Perdue’s business record.

A 2005 deposition from Perdue was leaked in October and included the line that Perdue “spent most of my career” outsourcing. It fit with the Democrats’ narrative and prompted renewed scrutiny on Perdue, particularly when he said he was “proud” of his career and denied outsourcing jobs — only products and services.

The election came down to a battle of O’s — Outsourcing vs. Obama. Perdue tied President Barack Obama to Nunn any chance he got, along with Reid.

Big names flocked to Georgia, including past and future White House contenders from both parties eyeing a potential 2016 swing state.

Nunn appeared with her father and former Gov. Zell Miller in the campaign’s final weeks to try to reinforce a centrist message and used the word “bipartisan” almost as much as Perdue used “Obama,” but it was not enough.

Screenshot: YouTube

In Georgia’s U.S. Senate Race, It’s All About…Race

In Georgia’s U.S. Senate Race, It’s All About…Race

By Lisa Mascaro, Tribune Washington Bureau (MCT)

ATLANTA — In the final stretch of one of the nation’s most competitive Senate contests, the politics of race — always present in this Southern capital — are dominating the campaign.

Long, festive lines of mostly African-American voters stretched through an Atlanta shopping mall over the weekend, as Democrats waiting to cast early ballots snapped selfies with civil rights icon John Lewis.

Black pastors preached against Republican-led efforts to impose voter ID restrictions, while vans idled outside to transport the faithful to Georgia’s first-ever Sunday polling stations.

“You push us up against a wall, we’ll push back,” said the Rev. William E. Flippin Sr. of Greater Piney Grove Baptist Church in Atlanta.

A new mailer released by the Democratic Party in Georgia evoked the racial violence that followed the August police shooting of an unarmed young black man in Missouri, suggesting that a vote for Democratic newcomer Michelle Nunn was the best way “to prevent another Ferguson.”

Republican David Perdue has taken a similar approach to rally turnout of the state’s declining white majority. The millionaire businessman sprinted last week through upscale exurbs, small-town cafes and a gun-and-pawn shop.

Though some Republicans complain that Democrats are playing up the historical racial divide, courting the state’s fast-growing African-American population with registration drives and turnout efforts, Tea Party leader Gail Engelhardt, 69, of Bartow County says she isn’t as worried about losing the GOP’s decadelong stronghold in Georgia. But she wondered whether all the new voters were sufficiently educated on the issues.

“Sometimes you wish there was a litmus test that somebody had to pass to vote,” said Engelhardt, a white Baptist Sunday school teacher.

Race has always been a staple in Peach State elections. And it’s no surprise that turning out Atlanta’s robust black population will be crucial to Nunn’s chances on Nov. 4. Polls show her running neck and neck against Perdue, with neither candidate likely to cross the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

But theirs is a cautionary tale in a state where many believe the demographic shift will soon define who wins elections. By most accounts, Georgia’s days as a conservative white Republican stronghold are numbered.

An influx of African-Americans has made Atlanta the nation’s second-largest black city, and a minority registration drive this summer signed up 135,000 voters.

Whites slipped to 58 percent of the state electorate from more than 70 percent just a decade ago. African-Americans and Latinos are approaching 35 percent. A similar trend is underway nationally, with U.S. minority populations on track to outnumber whites in about 30 years, according to U.S. census estimates.

But focusing too heavily on race runs risks for both sides. Republicans know they need to broaden their base beyond the diminishing white electorate, while Democrats must appeal to moderate white voters to form a coalition that can win.

“When you think about the demographic shifts having an impact on elections, the question is always: When will that happen?” said Stacey Abrams, the Democratic House minority leader for the state General Assembly, who orchestrated the ambitious voter registration drive.

“The reality is the demographic shift was only going to be meaningful if that translated into registrations — and that’s something that happened this year,” she said. “The challenge for Republicans is their growth options are limited.”

At the Republican office in downtown Rome, a former textile town being revitalized as a retiree hub outside Atlanta, Perdue acknowledged that after a brutal primary, his more immediate task was uniting Republicans, not reaching out to the state’s growing black, Latino and other minority populations.

“We haven’t done a good job at outreach,” he said in an interview, predicting his campaign will nevertheless draw minority voters. “But it’s a long struggle.”

Like Nunn, daughter of former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, Perdue is a newcomer with a famous family name. In 2003, his cousin Sonny Perdue became the first Republican in Georgia elected as governor since the Reconstruction. Since then, Republicans have steadily come to dominate statewide offices.

But Nunn’s relentless attacks on Perdue’s business leadership have had an effect. She accused him of building a career by running companies that outsourced jobs from a state with the nation’s highest unemployment rate. Then Perdue stumbled during a recent debate, downplaying a pay discrimination lawsuit filed against one of his companies by saying it involved “less than 2,000 people.” Nunn replied, “That actually seems like quite a lot to me.”

Perdue’s supporters, like Ansley Saville, a Republican volunteer who has spent most of her life in Rome, is less concerned by his executive past than by how black churches are busing voters to the polls in Atlanta.

“If you say anything, you’re racist — the big ‘R’ word,” said Saville, who works part time at her husband’s steel company.

At the mall over the weekend, Drew and Monica Stevenson, with their 3-year-old daughter, Aubrey, took advantage of early voting. The young African-American professionals, transplants from Tennessee eight years ago, cast ballots for Nunn and hope their votes will begin to move Georgia away from the GOP.

“Everything’s so extreme — on both sides,” said Drew Stevenson, a computer engineer. “There’s a higher Democratic population than people think.”

Theirs were among 12,000 early votes cast last Sunday. Though 66 percent of those ballots were from African-Americans, just 835 were from newly registered voters, according to an analysis by longtime Republican strategist Mark Rountree. That’s hardly a game-changer, he said.

Nunn has struggled to rally Democratic voters, particularly as she creates distance from President Barack Obama and portrays herself as a moderate alternative to Washington partisanship, much the way her father positioned himself when he was a senator. She says her campaign is “illustrative of the tapestry of Georgia and its diversity.”

But it’s unclear whether she’ll be able to energize enough African-Americans. For Nunn to win, strategists say, black turnout will need to hit 30 percent, and early-voting results so far suggest she is hitting her mark.

But the choices this November drew an audible groan from LaVerne Johnson, a health care manager who relocated to the Atlanta suburbs from New Jersey and says she has had a hard time adjusting to the state’s conservative slant.

She called Nunn the “lesser of two evils.” Said Johnson: “I’m just watching the campaigns these last months and, ugh, it’s just like, we can do better than this.”

Photo: Members of Piney Grove church in Atlanta board one of several vans used on October 26, to transport voters to early-voting polling stations. It marked the first time polls in Georgia were open on a Sunday. Democratic organizers hope the van pools will help increase turnout of black voters. (Edmund Sanders/Los Angeles Times/MCT)

The Blue-Collar Imperative

The Blue-Collar Imperative

WASHINGTON — In Georgia, Democrat Michelle Nunn is giving Republicans a real scare in a Senate race the GOP thought it had put away. Some of her new momentum comes from a sustained attack on David Perdue, her businessman foe, for his work shipping American jobs overseas.

One ad includes a quotation from Perdue about his outsourcing past: “Defend it? I’m proud of it.” The tagline: “David Perdue, he’s not for you.”

Meanwhile in Kentucky, Alison Lundergan Grimes, trailing in the polls against Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, has refused to say whether she voted for President Obama. But when Hillary Clinton came to the state to campaign for her last week, Grimes was proud to call herself “a Clinton Democrat.”

This is no accident: In Kentucky’s 2008 presidential primary, Clinton defeated Obama 65 percent to 30 percent. Coal country in Eastern Kentucky is a battleground in the Senate contest, and Clinton swept the region six years ago. In Magoffin County, Clinton received 93 percent of the vote.

Finally, consider a speech Clinton’s husband made in New Hampshire last Thursday, campaigning on behalf of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and the rest of the Democratic ticket. “I feel like an old racehorse in a stable,” former President Bill Clinton told a crowd of about 1,200 at a fundraiser to appreciative laughter, “and people just take me out and put me on the track and slap me on the rear to see if I can run around one more time.”

But his message about the Republicans was dead serious. “They want you to cast resentment votes,” he declared. “Resentment against the president. Resentment against the Affordable Care Act. Resentment against the last bad thing that happened.”

The elections in Georgia and Kentucky are different in important ways, but one lesson from both is that Democrats can’t win without a sufficient share of the white working-class vote. Nunn, on offense, and Grimes, on defense, are both trying to secure ballots from the sorts of voters who were once central to the Democratic coalition.

And Bill Clinton’s comments reflected what his party is up against: Republicans have been quite effective at turning the anger that working-class whites feel about being left behind in the new economy against liberals, Democrats and especially the president. The Democrats’ worries were nicely captured in a headline on Matthew Cooper’s recent Newsweek article: “Why Working-Class White Men Make Democrats Nervous.”

There is no reason to be dainty or evasive in saying that racism and racial resentment are part of the equation, and it’s not just that Obama is our first African-American president. Racial politics has been helping Republicans since the 1960s when much of the white South realigned toward the GOP in reaction to the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights.

This year, it’s not hard to see coded messages in Republican advertisements blanketing the airwaves tying the Islamic State and even Ebola fears to immigration and border security, or ads in gubernatorial campaigns in Maine and Massachusetts about welfare.

Yet race is not the only thing going on. Andrew Levison, the author of The White Working Class Today, says it’s important to distinguish between racial feelings today and those of a half-century ago. “It’s not 1950s racism,” he told me. “It’s more a sense of aggrievement — that Democrats care about other groups but not about the white working class.”

Complicating matters, but also giving Democrats hope, is the fact that younger members of the white working are more culturally liberal than their elders. They are also more open to a stronger government role in the economy, as Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress have shown.

Perdue’s problems on outsourcing, like Mitt Romney’s 2012 troubles related to his own business background, reveal the major soft spot in the GOP’s white working-class armor: that many blue-collar Americans combine a mistrust of Democrats with a deep skepticism about the corporate world. Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, says this points the way toward arguments that progressives need to make in the future.

“We have to expose the unholy alliance between money and politics,” she says. “Concern about inequality is unifying, it’s cross-partisan, and it’s not ideological.”

This will play some this year but may loom larger in 2016. For now, vulnerable Democrats seem eager to have the old racehorse on the track, and Arkansas and Louisiana were the next stops on Bill Clinton’s schedule. He’s trying to bring home voters who once saw his party as the working man’s best friend.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Be The Change, Inc via Flickr

Despite Polls, GOP Still Quietly Opposes Marriage Equality

Despite Polls, GOP Still Quietly Opposes Marriage Equality

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago, Georgia, like several other states, was in a lather over same-sex unions; its voters passed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and that prohibition, though it has been challenged in federal court, still stands.

It was a bipartisan hysteria. Georgia’s constitutional amendment passed with 76 percent of the vote — many Democrats joining Republicans, blacks and Latinos joining whites, Bible thumpers joining occasional churchgoers to pass a law denying a basic human right to a portion of the population.

But at a debate earlier this month, U.S. Senate candidate Michelle Nunn, a Democrat, declared her support for gay marriage. Polls show that Nunn is in a near dead-heat with her Republican opponent, David Perdue, and has a good shot at winning the seat held by retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). Nunn clearly believes that backing gay unions is a winning strategy — even in a Deep South state where the religious right still holds considerable political sway.

Meanwhile, Republicans are scrambling to recalibrate their historical hostility to gay rights, trying to walk a tightrope between their aging, narrow-minded base and the moderates and millennials they wish to attract. GOP strategists understand that their party can ill afford to build on the perception that it is a closed tent; bigoted and homogeneous.

Those trends underscore the stunning cultural shift on the issue of gay marriage over just the last few years. When Georgia joined 10 other states in 2004 to ban same-sex unions, millennial voters (the Pew Research Center defines them as the cohort born between 1981 and 1996) were not a political force, so their liberal cultural views had not yet affected elections. Meanwhile, lesbian and gay activists were struggling to overcome a host of repressive measures.

Ever Machiavellian, Karl Rove stepped up to put the anti-gay-rights sensibilities of that time to use in George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Rove drummed up support for constitutional amendments banning same-sex unions in state legislatures around the country, hoping that single issue would push marginal but ultra-conservative voters to the polls. Election analysts believe their votes made the difference in the crucial state of Ohio, where Bush eked out a victory.

Now, leading Republican figures have joined the fight for full marriage equality. Ken Mehlman, a gay man who was Bush’s political director in 2004 (and who did nothing to blunt Rove’s cynical strategy), has joined the gay marriage movement. Ted Olson, who served as Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, has represented gay marriage advocates in court.

Reactions to the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprising — and confusing — decision not to take up the issue of gay marriage during this session were also telling. When the court punted, it left in place rulings allowing gay marriage in several states. In response, many Republican congressional candidates said absolutely nothing.

“This was something the party largely hoped to avoid talking about, and that’s why they’ve been silent,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told The Hill newspaper. “Some of these Republicans in these purple states are finding themselves in a bind … if you look at the totality of it, this is not a great situation for Republicans.”

It won’t be easy for GOP politicians to repudiate the position that they have advocated for so long. Perdue — Georgia’s GOP Senate candidate — continues to support that state’s ban, hiding behind the questionable logic of states’ rights.

“As a U.S. senator, I’m not going to get involved in state decisions like this. It’s a constitutional amendment. If that changes, then I will support that with the population,” Perdue has said.

Other Republicans, counting on their backward-looking base, have kept up the drumbeat of anti-gay-marriage rhetoric. The inimitable Ted Cruz (R-TX) called the Supreme Court’s inaction “tragic.”

But recent polls show why the GOP is trying to bury its record. Fifty-four percent of Americans now favor same-sex marriage, according to Pew — the younger the sample of voters, the more likely they are to support it. Democrats like Michelle Nunn can read those polls, too.

Screenshot: YouTube

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