In one more week, Georgia will hold its earliest primary election ever and give a definitive answer on the race everybody is watching, the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. Recent polls have established some clear trend lines as to which GOP candidates should advance to the runoff election.
Businessman David Perdue has been running in first place, but his support has fluctuated below the 30 percent level. U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah and former secretary of state Karen Handel appear to be battling for the second spot in the runoff.
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun of Athens, who’s always had problems raising money, has settled back into fourth place, while Rep. Phil Gingrey of Cobb County has dropped to fifth place in most recent polls.
These trends suggest it will be Perdue facing either Kingston or Handel in a hellacious runoff election. But if there’s one lesson we should have learned about Georgia politics, it is that polls in a primary campaign can be very unreliable. To illustrate, we need look no farther back than the Republican primary in the governor’s race four years ago.
For months in 2010, the poll results kept telling us that John Oxendine, a highly controversial insurance commissioner for 16 years, was leading the primary field and seemed to be the most likely nominee to run against former governor Roy Barnes in the general election. I’m not talking about dubious surveys conducted by sloppy polling firms, either. These included polls commissioned by the state’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on behalf of a consortium of Georgia newspapers that paid big bucks for the survey numbers. Just six days prior to the primary election, the Journal-Constitution released a poll showing Oxendine in first place with 31 percent among likely Republican primary voters, with Karen Handel at 23 percent, and Nathan Deal at 18 percent.
Comments ( 0 )