Nunn Struggles To Motivate White Voters

Georgia Senate Democratic nominee Michelle Nunn seems to be losing steam in the closing days of her campaign. Even The New York Times is admitting that Nunn’s GOP opponent, businessman David Perdue has taken the lead in most polls, leaving Nunn two to three points behind.

Much of Perdue’s new support comes from white voters. He is leading Nunn by 40 percent, up three points, among white voters from over a month ago. The Times contends Nunn needs to get near 30 percent of the white vote to have a chance at getting the 50 percent she needs to avoid a runoff. However, the most recent poll shows Nunn has only 25 percent of the white vote in Georgia.

While it looks as if Nunn is on her way to pick up strong support from black voters, if she only attains 25 or 26 percent of the white vote, it may be enough for her to get about 47 or 48 percent in total after undecided voter ballots are tallied, The Times says.

Nunn’s refusal to denounce the controversial Ferguson shooting-themed flyers that were mailed from her state party to black communities in Georgia may have been a risky move when she needs to motivate enough white voters to go to the polls for her.

Georgia GOP spokesman Ryan Mahoney appears confident that a runoff can be avoided in part through Republican voter enthusiasm as well as the new Republican GOTV effort known as Victory 365.

“Internal polling and recent polling shows Perdue and [Nathan] Deal at 49. I saw a poll yesterday showing Deal at 51. So it’s right there, but how do you get past that? It goes kind of back to [Victory] 365. It goes back to this office. This [office] is an exception, because this is really a competitive Congressional, but I’m posting up all of these photos on our Twitter and Facebook from our victory offices and they are wall to wall with people,” Mahoney said.

“I’ve worked in this business for ten years and I’ve never seen this many people on the Republican side get so excited about a midterm election,” he adds. “So I think the polling misses the enthusiasm gap between Republicans and Democrats. And I think, and you’ve seen early voting numbers are at a record high–over 700,000 and those numbers look good for us. But when it comes to election day there have never been more Georgia Republicans on the ground pushing people to the polls than there are now–even more than 2010. This is by far the largest effort that we will execute.”

Additionally the Libertarian nominee in the race, Amanda Swafford, will probably pick off only about 3 percent of the vote. That could be enough to send the race into a runoff January 6. In a runoff situation, Nunn would have more obstacles, because Libertarian voters may break for the GOP candidate and re-motivating their voters to the polls tends to be more of a problem for the Democratic Party.

“We’ve never lost a runoff in Georgia, I think, since the 90’s. So we’ve been absolutely perfect with Georgia runoffs, and I fully expect them to continue that. If it goes to a runoff, we’ll win it,” Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer said.