Posted on 11/06/2002 7:55:42 AM PST by LTCJ
[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 11/6/02 ]
ELECTION 2002
Republicans roll
Perdue elected Georgia's first GOP governor in 130 years
Chambliss ousts Cleland amid party's gains nationwide
By JIM GALLOWAY
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
Gov. Roy Barnes and House Speaker Tom Murphy were swept from office Tuesday, as voters ended 130 years of Democratic domination and created a divided state government that leads Georgia into uncharted territory.
Sonny Perdue, a former state senator from middle Georgia who was outspent 6-to-1, became the state's first Republican governor since 1872. Georgia was the only state in the nation that didn't elect a Republican governor sometime in the 20th century.
Perdue declared victory at 12:05 a.m. today. He said Barnes had called and "graciously recognized that the people of Georgia had spoken. And you'll have a new governor next January," Perdue told cheering supporters.
"You've stunned Georgia, you've stunned the nation tonight! Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!" Perdue cried.
In a brief concession speech, Barnes promised a friendly transition. "The interests of the people shall remain paramount," Barnes told supporters at Democratic headquarters at Atlanta's downtown Hyatt hotel. He conceded that the fight over a new state flag had an effect and might have brought out "white rural voters" against him.
The state Legislature apparently will remain in Democratic hands, although a fierce battle for new leadership will begin immediately to replace Murphy, who had served as House speaker for three decades. Murphy lost to Republican Bill Heath.
Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor, who won re-election Tuesday, becomes the ranking Democrat in state government.
Republican challenger Saxby Chambliss handily defeated Democratic incumbent Max Cleland in a race that could tilt the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Republicans also held onto their majority in the U.S. House by winning two of three open seats.
"We've never seen anything like this in our lifetime," said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political scientist. "We really don't have anything to compare this to."
Tuesday's vote sets up an immediate confrontation between the Legislature and Perdue, a former Democratic leader who switched parties in 1998.
In campaign speech after campaign speech -- Perdue's $3 million campaign treasury didn't allow much TV presence -- Perdue denounced Barnes as an arrogant, dictatorial leader.
Perdue has promised to hire an inspector general to root out waste in state government. He also vowed to redraw political boundaries, to eliminate income taxes on non-wage income for senior citizens and to dismantle Barnes' four-year effort at education reform.
His most controversial proposal, however, is for a referendum on the state flag. Last year, Barnes engineered a change in the flag to reduce the dominance of the Confederate battle emblem. Perdue argued a referendum is the only way to ease the bad feelings that developed over the way Barnes changed the flag.
"Politics in Georgia has changed for all times," said Senate Majority Leader Charles Walker of Augusta. "The new governor is going to have to work on consensus-building."
But Walker won't be there to see the new order. The Democrat lost his seat minutes later.
Turnout was the key to the national Republican victory, which exceeded the gains made by the party during the 1994 revolution authored by Newt Gingrich.
Among Democrats, the lure of $54 million in touch-screen voting machines apparently was no match for 1.5 inches of rain that fell before 7 p.m. in metro Atlanta.
Chris Riggall, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, predicted a turnout of about 46 percent -- roughly the same level as the 1998 mid-term election.
Turnout was 66 percent in the 2000 presidential election.
The secretary of state's office had earlier in the day predicted a turnout of 54 percent, and early reports indicated heavy voting across the state. Riggall theorized voters may have been discouraged as the cold rain worsened.
"The traditional thinking in Georgia is that rain and bad weather has a disproportionate effect on Democratic turnout," Riggall said.
The lower-than-expected showing came despite confessions by both Democrats and Republicans -- made as soon as the polls closed -- of unprecedented, multimillion-dollar efforts to get their supporters to the polls.
With the U.S. Senate at stake, money was of little concern, and tradition went out the window. Neither party offered more than vague figures on how much money was spent.
But in the final two weeks, the state Republican party sent 5.8 million pieces of campaign literature through the mail, and made 2.5 million phone calls to voters. "This has never been done at this level in Georgia," said state GOP chairman Ralph Reed.
Republicans in the top statewide races, Chambliss for U.S. Senate and Perdue for governor, boasted strong south Georgia ties.
But on Tuesday, both parties focused on metro Atlanta.
Spurred by a visit from President Bush, nine busloads of Republican volunteers knocked on 30,000 doors in Cobb, Cherokee and Gwinnett counties in five hours on Saturday afternoon.
The effort apparently paid off.
Democrats had their own targets.
For the first time, Democratic strategists said they didn't rely solely on churches and civil rights leaders to boost the participation of African-Americans.
The party organizers used small teams to target 300 important precincts in Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton counties. Democrats said they had more than a thousand volunteers slogging through wet streets on Tuesday.
Party officials thought they had offset any dampening of the turnout in south DeKalb county, where supporters of U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who was defeated in the August primary, had threatened to stay home -- or vote Republican.
-- Staff writers Ben Smith, Alan Judd, Jim Tharpe, James Salzer and Jen Sansbury contributed to this article. Data analysis by Maurice Tamman.
Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, free at last!" Perdue cried.
Amen and Amen!
Roll on!
My comment? "Yeah, apparently it was raining all over the country."
How's that for goober peas?! Free-government Georgians have a lot to be proud of today. But it's just a start...
Chambliss in.
Barnes out!
Cleland out!
We done good.
Barnes "women yakking" radio commercials drove me nuts, for whatever that's worth.
Let's hope Governor-elect Perdue carries out his audits and changes.
Having Murphy gone is a really good start.
If I were a Belle instead of a Southern Gentleman, I might just have broken down and swooned.
I can't wait to see the scramble in the Legislature when a lot of the Dims realize there is no safe harbor. I think the aftershocks may be as interesting as the earthquake.
This is bigger than the governor's race. Murphy is the one who has pulled the strings in Georgia for over a generation.
Absolutely! He's been a bad actor for decades, and while Governors come & go, the Speaker for the House has no such limits, other than his ability to hold on to the post.
You have a good point. Hard to tell how it will shake out. There is literally no one alive who has navigated the waters we are about to enter.
All I know is the GOP is on deck putting on Raybans and the Dims are down in the bilges writing, "Beyond This Pointe There be Dragons" on their capital phone directories.
Btw, is the site slowing down?
I figured that with Cleland's horrible record Chambliss had a chance to make it close. (I didn't figure he'd win as big as he did.) But I never in a million years thought that Sonny Perdue could fight all of King Roy's money and influence.
My take on it (and I said it to my son and husband about 20 minutes before Neal Boortz came on the air and said it) is that DemoRats are going to blame this on Roy's unilateral change of the state flag and try to call us all a bunch of two-toothed redneck knuckledraggers. But that's not it (or that's only part of it).
It's not the fact that Barnes changed the state flag to remove (or shrink to vanishing point) the old Confederate Battle Flag . . . it's the WAY he went about it, doing it in secret by agreement and arm-twisting a bunch of legislators, with no public input and no public vote. Barnes has shown over and over again -- with the state teachers, with the redistricting -- that that is just the way he does (ahem, DID) business. No pretense at a public vote, no discussion in the legislature, he's like the Centurion in the Bible, he says go and men go. That's why people started calling him "King Roy."
But I never believed that he couldn't buy or arm-twist his way back into the governor's office. People were a whole lot madder than I thought, and he just made too many different groups of people mad.
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