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A Senate Runoff in Georgia Tries to Rouse Voters After an Intense Election
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Race
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| Contributor | ArmyDem |
| Last Edited | ArmyDem Nov 14, 2008 09:10am |
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| Category | News |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Thursday, November 13, 2008 03:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: November 13, 2008
DECATUR, Ga. — In a brightly lighted storefront in this Atlanta suburb, volunteers have been busy calling people who had donated their time for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “I know we got Obama elected,” Alexandra Songer, 20, told one voter with a practiced air. “But half our work is yet to be done.”
Ms. Songer was trying to build support for Jim Martin, the Democratic challenger who forced Senator Saxby Chambliss, the Republican incumbent, into a Dec. 2 runoff. That contest may have difficulty drawing voters, but it has already attracted national attention as the final battle of an intense election season, widely framed as the first test of Mr. Obama’s coattails.
The candidates have hastened to make the race a referendum on the president-elect. Mr. Martin has said he will support Mr. Obama’s agenda, while Mr. Chambliss’s supporters have presented him as a firewall against unchecked liberal power in the Senate, where Republicans are trying to prevent Democrats from winning a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
But given that voter turnout is the deciding factor in runoff elections, the race is perhaps more accurately a test of the vaunted political infrastructure — the new Democratic voters, the precinct captains, the volunteers — that the Obama campaign has left behind in hard-fought places like Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, and how well that organization will work when the name Obama is no longer on the ballot. |
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