WWTBAM Bored

Incumbent Senator Saxbe Chambliss (R) and challenger Jim Martin (D) are polling nearly even in the Senate race. There is a Libertarian candidate, Allen Buckley, who will poll in the low single digits.

Georgia is a state where U.S. Senate and House candidates must receive 50% +1 votes to win and it is well within the realm of possibility that neither Chambliss or Martin will achieve that.

There would then be a runoff of December-2.

Playing out the dream scenario for political junkies, this one remaining undecided seat could give the Democrats the 60 seats they need to invoke cloture. Instead of planning for his new administration, the President-elect would be spending a lot of time campaigning for a candidate here in Georgia. The TV ads are pretty low-brow as is stands; I can only imagine what the landscape would like like if we're subjected to another four weeks of this.

bazodee wrote:Incumbent Senator Saxbe Chambliss (R) and challenger Jim Martin (D) are polling nearly even in the Senate race. There is a Libertarian candidate, Allen Buckley, who will poll in the low single digits.

Georgia is a state where U.S. Senate and House candidates must receive 50% +1 votes to win and it is well within the realm of possibility that neither Chambliss or Martin will achieve that.

There would then be a runoff of December-2.

Playing out the dream scenario for political junkies, this one remaining undecided seat could give the Democrats the 60 seats they need to invoke cloture. Instead of planning for his new administration, the President-elect would be spending a lot of time campaigning for a candidate here in Georgia. The TV ads are pretty low-brow as is stands; I can only imagine what the landscape would like like if we're subjected to another four weeks of this.

In 1992, when Georgia had a Democratic majority in the state legislature, then-Senator Wyche Fowler barely beat Republican Paul Coverdell in the Senate election. However, the Libertarian candidate got enough votes to deny Fowler a majority and force a runoff, which Coverdell won. Fowler beat Coverdell in the first election by 35,000 votes out of 2.2 million. The runoff had about half the turnout and Coverdell won by 15,000. Ironically, a citizen's group headed by Ralph Nader unsuccessfully filed suit to have Fowler declared the winner.

The legislature amended the law so that a runoff would only be required in a general election if the winner did not receive at least 45% of the vote. This would allow for a legitimate third party candidate splitting the vote significantly but would avoid a runoff in the Fowler-Coverdell situation where the third party candidate gets only a tiny fraction of the vote.

In 1996, Max Cleland failed to get a majority of the votes, but he did get 45%, so he was elected to the Senate over his Republican opponent. So when the Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2004, they repealed the 45% law and replaced it with the old 50% law. Now, most polls show Republican Chambliss slightly in the lead and he would be most likely to lose if the runoff scenario comes into affect again.

Ironically, the Georgia runoff law came about after another major election squabble. In the 1966 Governor's election, Lester Maddox won the primary runoff against the more liberal Democrat Ellis Arnall (Arnall had received a plurality in the first primary election). A sizable write-in campaign emerged for Arnall in the general election and he received enough write-in votes so that Republican Bo Calloway actually got a plurality against Maddox in the 1966 General Election. This was actually the first time in modern history that the Republicans fielded a serious candidate for governor. Under the law at the time, the Georgia General Assembly (which was virtually all Democratic) chose the winner between Calloway and Maddox and not surprisingly chose Maddox. Naturally, that led to a big stink and Maddox himself championed the runoff law that eventually decided the 1992 election in order to avoid a repeat of the 1966 scenario.

bazodee wrote: The TV ads are pretty low-brow as is stands; I can only imagine what the landscape would like like if we're subjected to another four weeks of this.

Both candidates have only two ads that they run over and over again, and usually in the same commercial break you will wind up seeing both candidates' ads one after the other. The ads are very negative and rather deceptive. Everyone I know is sick and tired of them, no matter what party they favor.

Chambliss has tons of money in his re-election campaign and he's spending it freely (you see 20 Chambliss ads for every McCain ad). Martin himself doesn't have much money but the Democratic Senate campaign committee is financing his ad buys.

After the disgusting propaganda that Chambliss and the Georgia GOP put out against war veteran Max Cleland 6 years ago, I would love to see Chambliss get tossed out by his ear next week. The chances of that are not very good... but it is one of my wishes for next week.