Steve Benen points out that today Sen. Chuck Schumer, (D-N.Y.), chairman of the DSCC, told reporters:
…Schumer and the Democrats have added other previous-cycle crimson states to their target list: Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s seat in Kentucky. He went so far as to call Georgia and Kentucky “even-steven races.” The DSCC put up their first ad in Kentucky today.
A Georgia resident, I dug around for more. I found the self-proclaimed “Data geek” for the Georgia Democratic Party and now-candidate for state House Chris Huttman. Says he:
Forget the polls. We have a tendency to live and die by the polls, and although they are looking pretty good for Georgia right now, the real magic is in the data. In 2004, 68.5% of Georgia’s active registered voters where white, 27.4% were African-American and 4.1% registered as some other race – or no race at all. That translated into an electorate that was roughly 71.3% white, 25.4% African-American and 3.3% other […]
It is likely that when all registrations are processed that had been submitted by Oct 1 and the additional registrations that came in after Oct 1 hit the file, Georgia will have added an additional 120,000 voters, of which nearly 50% are expected to be African-American.
You really must see his charts and graphs. He’s convincing:
Guys, this is real. More than 348k Georgians have gone to their county seats and voted early or submitted an absentee ballot by mail. With nearly 4 weeks to go until election day, our total turnout is already 11% what it was as of 2004. Amazingly, at this point African-Americans represent over 37% of the electorate and Other voters made up 4%. At a combined rate of 41%, they are currently outperforming their 2004 totals by 12%!
About the Senate, Nate Silver:
The most substantial movement this week is in Georgia, where several polls now show a tight race between Saxby Chambliss and Jim Martin. Martin remains relatively underfunded, but his economic populist message is a good fit for his state, his advertising has been sharp, and Chambliss did not do himself any favors by voting for the bailout. Still, Chambliss remains narrowly ahead.
Narrowly. Hm. Some of us believe Georgia’s onerous voter identification laws — there is virtually no evidence that voter fraud ever existed — are really about voter deterrence. The old dogs may have come up with some new tricks…
Earlier I mentioned that the feds are questioning new voter checks in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. Drill down:
Election officials in Georgia ran more than 1.9 million checks on voter files or voter registration applications and found more than 260,000 nonmatches.
Officials of the Social Security Administration, presented with those numbers, said they were far too high to be cases where names were not in state databases. They said the data seem to represent a violation of federal law and the contract the states signed with the agency to use the database.
Georgia’s U.S. Senate candidates will debate tonight.