A competitive primary for governor that’s headed to an Aug. 10 runoff prompted 285,113 more Georgians to pick Republican rather than Democratic ballots during Tuesday’s primary.
According to the Georgia Secretary of State, 679,702 residents voted Republican versus 394,589 who voted Democratic.
In the next round, former Secretary of State Karen Handel will go up against former Congressman Nathan Deal to see who’ll face former Gov. Roy Barnes in the general election Nov. 2.
Riding on name recognition and an extensive set of TV ads, Barnes easily took his party’s nomination with 258,875 votes statewide or 65.6 percent. Handel got 231,715 or 34.1 percent. Deal had 155,795 or 22.9 percent.
Here in largely Democratic Muscogee County, where 6,967 residents voted in the Democratic Primary versus 6,114 in the Republican one, Barnes easily took the field with 59.7 percent, drawing 4,159 votes to Attorney General Thurbert Baker’s 1,877 or 26.9 percent. No other candidate got a four-digit number. Barnes also got more Columbus votes than any Republican candidate.
Handel outpaced her primary opponents, drawing 44 percent of the total with 2,692 votes. Her nearest competitor, Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, got 25.3 percent with 1,545. Deal ran third with 17.8 percent or 1,086.
Forget the parties and give all 14 candidates who tried out for governor equal footing on Muscogee’s playing field, and here’s the score: Twenty-seven of Columbus’ 48 voting precincts went for Barnes, 19 for Handel.
Two tied: At the Gallops center, Oxendine and Barnes each got 26 votes; at Edgewood Baptist Church, Handel and Barnes each had 38.
That tie at Gallops was as close as Oxendine came to making any precinct his own. He was the top Republican vote-getter in six, but everywhere Oxendine led the Republican field, Barnes still got most of the votes overall, and typically the former governor got a lot more than the insurance commissioner — especially on the south side of town where few residents chose Republican ballots.
At Spencer High School, for example, seven people voted for Oxendine, 79 for Barnes. At Eddy Middle School, where a dozen went for Oxendine and only five for Handel, 27 voted for Barnes. At St. John A.M.E. Church, where Oxendine got 10 votes, Barnes got 201. At Carver, Oxendine got six votes; Barnes got 93.
In precincts where Deal was the top Republican, Barnes got many times more votes: At St. Mary’s Elementary School, where Deal got four votes and Handel and Oxendine tied with two, Barnes got 179. At Liberty Baptist Church, where Deal again got four votes, Handel got three and Oxendine one, Barnes got 121.
Otherwise the battle for local precincts was all Barnes and Handel, possibly a preview of the choice voters here will have to make in November — depending, of course, on what happens in the Republican runoff.
It was Handel’s late surge to lead the Republican pack in poll numbers right before the primary that grabbed political junkies’ attention.
Local attorney Josh McKoon, a former Republican Party chair now running for the Georgia Senate District 29 seat, said he was watching the numbers come in Tuesday night and noticed Handel doing well not only in Muscogee, but in other area counties as well.
“The thing that was interesting to me, at least on the Republican side of the governor’s race, is how strong Karen Handel ran in our area,” he said. “She got 44 percent of the vote countywide in Muscogee County, and she did nearly as well in Harris County and Troup County. She finished first in all three.”
Some political analysts might have figured another contender would score better in this part of the state, he said: “Obviously she’s a metro Atlanta candidate. Her home base is Fulton County. So it was surprising to me that she was as strong as she was versus, say, Eric Johnson, who is from Savannah and perceived maybe more as a south Georgia or south of Atlanta candidate.”
Of Georgia’s 159 counties, Handel took 63, Deal 36 and Oxendine 33. Johnson was a distant fourth with 23.
Handel took Chattahoochee County with 36 votes out of 105, though Oxendine was close with 30. She won Marion County with 177 votes out of 463; Harris with 1,107 out of 2,789; Talbot with 110 out of 316; and Troup with 1,167 out of 3,930.
Deal got Meriwether County with 408 out of 1,520. There Handel got 378, Johnson 365 and Oxendine 290.
Statewide, Barnes swept all counties except Johnson and Laurens. Those went to DuBose Porter, who lives in Dublin and represents the area in the Georgia House.
Barnes’ vote count around Columbus was this: 53 out of 114 in Chattahoochee, 180 out of 316 in Marion, 363 out of 573 in Talbot, 439 out of 728 in Harris, 979 out of 1,525 in Meriwether, and 1,221 out of 1,775 in Troup.
The surprise on the Democratic side was not Barnes’ winning without a runoff, but his margin of victory. Polls showed him with a comfortable lead going into Tuesday’s primary, but not with 66 percent of the vote. “Most of the polling looked like he would be in the 50s, so that was kind of a surprise,” McKoon said.
What McKoon found most interesting, though, was that Handel came close to matching Barnes’ votes statewide, though her percentage of the Republican vote versus what Barnes’ got from Democrats hardly balances.
“I think she’s within 10 or 15,000 votes of the vote total Roy got with over 60 percent of the Democratic Primary vote,” he said.
And again there’s the total number of Georgians who picked Republican ballots as compared to those who voted in the Democratic Primary — 679,702 versus 394,589.
“That’s only happened to my knowledge one other time in Georgia, where the general Republican Primary outstripped the Democrats, and that was in 2002,” McKoon said. That’s when Barnes, then the incumbent, lost to Gov. Sonny Perdue.
That’s a nice partisan spin to put on the primaries, said John Van Doorn of the Muscogee County Democratic Party, but it ignores some crucial factors:
First of all, the Republicans had more competitive races on their ballots, the one for governor being just the most prominent.
The Democrats saw polls showing Barnes leading easily, and other races where no one faced opposition, including Congressman Sanford Bishop.
“What you have to do is look at each and every race, and I think what you’ll notice is in the uncontested races, like Sanford and others, yeah, the turnout’s going to be low ‘cause all you’re doing is endorsing, basically, the person you know is going to be on the ballot,” he said. “If you look at the races where it is competitive, the numbers are much different. … In fact in some cases there are more Democrats turning out, in different precincts than there were Republicans.”
Boosting Democratic turnout for the general election will be a priority this year, as will broadening the party’s appeal, he said. Candidates may be able to attract some of the “angry populists” such as tea party activists.
Republican incumbents should be wary of that element, he said. “I think overall our prospects look very good, because it really is an anti-incumbent year, and I think when people look at the state Georgia’s in, it’s going to be a pretty natural leap: Let’s get the folks out of office that put us in this mess.”
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