Having gone through the incorporation of the City of Brookhaven as a resident, I can say that the service improvements have been significant, especially the increased presence and visibility of the Brookhaven Police Department. St Simons has the additional reason to bring police services onto the island of being geographically distinct and distant from the rest of Glynn County.

In Memory of Mack Burgess

Yesterday, we received news that Mack Burgess, who worked for the Georgia Republican Party in support of Governor Nathan Deal’s reelection campaign was killed in an auto accident.

Shortly after 4 p.m., Deal’s campaign office released an emailed statement on Burgess’ death.

“Mack was an incredible young man, smart, hard-working, with a bright future ahead of him,” Deal said. “This is a terrible loss for everyone in our organization and for anyone who knew him. We are going to take some time to grieve and pay our respects to Mack and to the Burgess family. I ask that everyone bear with us as we take a break from the campaign to mourn a life ended much too soon.”

Georgia lost a good man who dedicated his professional career to improving the lives of Georgians.

I first met Mack when he was managing Stan Wise’s 2012 reelection campaign to the Public Service Commission. One of Stan’s colleagues recalled Mack being asked to speak on Stan’s behalf at an event and doing so much more professionally than would be expected his age – at the time, Mack was literally weeks or months past his college graduation.

This year he saw increasing responsibility at the helm of a Congressional campaign and after that as a member of the Georgia Republican Party’s staff supporting Governor Deal.

May God bring peace to our friend, Mack Burgess, and all who called him friend, brother, or family.

Video

Undecided Voters and Turnout

The AJC brings us this stunning meaningless statement headline, “Undecided votes key to Georgia’s tight races”

In Georgia the races for the top offices, particularly governor and U.S. Senate, are neck and neck. That has far-reaching implications and has placed the Peach State in the national spotlight.

A mix of local polls on the Georgia races show between 3 percent and 9 percent of likely voters surveyed as being undecided. With early voting underway and Election Day less than three weeks away, candidates are targeting these voters, spending millions of dollars on advertising.

“This is the group the commercial ads are directed to. This group tends to wait until the last minute to make up their minds, or don’t have enough information to make a decision,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University. “You try to appeal to them based on their perceived preferences and issues that are likely to grab their attention.”

There is always a portion of the voting population who are late to choose a candidate. But they are playing an integral role this year in places, like Georgia, with competitive Senate races, Gillespie said. As the election gets closer, she expects the number of undecided voters to shrink.

The thing to remember, she said, “by Nov. 4, they are not undecided anymore.”

That’s undoubtedly true, but some evidence points to trends favoring the Republican party and its candidates both nationally and in Georgia.

From the Washington Post’s The Fix column,

In Georgia, we only have racial data available, which is admittedly more tricky. In the key Senate race in the state, white voters back David Perdue (R) by a two-to-one margin while black voters support Michelle Nunn (D) by 10-to-1, according to a recent SurveyUSA poll. We colored Georgia’s dots light blue and red to facilitate reading the graph quickly. It’s white voters who are turning out more so far, by a wide margin.

This will change. As the weeks pass, those dots will move around, sometimes a lot. But for Democratic operatives in Georgia and Florida, and Republican ones in Iowa and Maine: you’d better get to work on changing them.

The New York Times, in Upshot, has a great column on polling, where we found this:

In our experience, those who tell you in an R.D.D. vote “definitely” are in fact the voters — “probably” are in fact the posers.

Just 85 percent of the self-identified Democrats said they would “certainly” or “probably” vote. Ninety-five percent of Republicans said they would “certainly” or “probably” vote. Fifteen percent of Democrats said they were 50-50 — four times as many as Republicans. And you can see how that moves the numbers: The registered voters who participated in 2010 or 2012 — or were newly registered since 2012 — identified as Democrats by a 35 to 33 margin. Among the likely voters, it’s Republicans by 34 to 32.

Roll Call looks at what it calls a “voter engagement gap,”

Turnout will drive the outcome. And polling in the past couple of weeks has sent strong signals that Republicans are more motivated to get to the polls and so will show up in potentially dispositive numbers.

Democratic voters are less interested in the elections than Republicans, according to survey results released over the weekend by the Wall Street Journal, NBC News and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The poll found that while all registered voters prefer a Democratic Congress by a narrow 48 percent to 43 percent, the number is more than reversed when it comes to the voters who say they’re very interested in the elections: 51 percent are hoping for a GOP sweep, while just 44 percent are rooting for the Democrats.

Similar, albeit more detailed, numbers were reported a week ago by Gallup. It found that, overall, voters have thought less about the elections, are less motivated to vote and are less enthusiastic about their choices than in the previous two midterms. But the Republican numbers on all three fronts are much better than for the Democrats: 12 points higher on attention paid to the campaign, 19 points higher on motivation to vote and 18 points higher on excitement about voting. “As a result, even if overall turnout is depressed compared with prior years, Republicans appear poised to turn out in greater numbers than Democrats,” Gallup concluded.

The Democrats are keenly aware of this voter engagement gap, which the pollsters say is about what it was before the GOP won control of the House in 2010 — then, just as now, voters were casting ballots to show their dissatisfaction with the job performances of both Congress and President Barack Obama.

I’m not sure what this means for the ultimate election results, but last night, Nate Cohn tweeted,

Cohn went on to clarify that refers to absentee ballots requested and

23 percent of the Georgians who have cast accepted ballots did not vote in 2010

Matt McDermott, a Democratic pollster, tweeted,

24% (of 90k) that have requested ballots are African American; 28% of those returned (43k) are African Americans.

Event Calendar

Veterans For Perdue: Sen. John McCain in Cobb County