Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for December 28, 2015

Georgia History

Legislation creating the city of Columbus, GA was signed on December 24, 1827.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia on December 28, 1856 and moved to Augusta, Georgia with his family a few years later. Wilson would later practice law in Atlanta, marry Ellen Axson of Rome, Georgia, and serve as President of the United States from 1913 to 1921. Recently, Princeton University debated removing Wilson’s name from campus.

The Kimball Opera House in Atlanta, a former location of the State Capitol, caught fire on December 27, 1894 and was destroyed.

On December 29, 1896, Georgia Governor William Y. Atkinson signed legislation creating the state Schoolbook Commission.

On December 26, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt watched a private viewing of Gone With the Wind at the White House.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

February 1, 2016 is the voter registration deadline to be eligible for voting in the 2016 Presidential Primary on March 1, called the “SEC Primary.”

Franklin Graham will hold a Prayer Rally at the Georgia State Capitol in Liberty Plaza on February 10, 2016 at Noon. As it happens, that’s nineteen days before Georgians go to the polls in the 2016 Presidential Preference Primary.

NPR has a piece on the organizational efforts put into Southern states like Georgia that will vote on March 1st.

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is making a big bet on building a strong organization outside the four early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The idea is to pick up a strong lead in delegates needed to secure the nomination when 14 states, mostly in the South, vote on March 1 in the so-called SEC primary.

One of the places Cruz is trying that strategy out in is Tennessee, where he’ll stop on Tuesday, part of a multiday tour of states voting on March 1.

“So as those other candidates fall off, where do the Carson people go? A lot of them are evangelical and they’re going to go to Cruz. The Huckabee, the Santorum, lot of those folks, I think, are going to gravitate to Cruz as you move ahead,” said Gill.

While Politico writes about the competition between Cruz and Trump for Southern votes.

The battle for the South has settled into a race between two candidates, and neither is Marco Rubio.

In interviews with more than two dozen party officials, political operatives and activists, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were repeatedly named as front-runners and likely winners in one of the most conservative regions of the country. Both contenders draw huge crowds and appeal to large swaths of middle- and lower-income white Republican Southerners, who are deeply angry with Washington.

Cruz has Trump, and the rest of the field, beat on organization, but Trump still lures the bigger audiences. And there is an increasing acknowledgment, even among the Republican elite, that the billionaire real estate developer has a committed base here, some of whom are likely voters and not the political celebrity gawkers many mainstream GOP operatives have guessed.

But the feeling on the ground is that Cruz has the momentum with conservative activists and that there’s some true support behind Trump’s high poll numbers, much as many party stalwarts wish otherwise. And while Rubio is generating considerable interest among more centrist Republican voters, he’s being squeezed not just on the right by Cruz but in the moderate lane by Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.

“Rubio’s got a lot of names, prominent elected officials; he’s the establishment darling right now,” said Chris Brown, a Birmingham, Alabama, consultant who is backing Bush. “But that is not contributing to rank-and-file voters. They are more Cruz-oriented.”

Large parts of Georgia are flooded by El Nino rains. On Christmas Eve, Gov. Nathan Deal declared a state of emergency in Fannin, Gilmer, and Pickens Counties in North Georgia.

The other flood worth watching out for is prefiled legislation for the 2016 Session of the Georgia General Assembly, which convenes on January 11th.

[S]tate Rep. Brad Raffensperger filed one proposal that would, if it should become law, set being registered to vote in Georgia as a requirement for anyone elected or appointed to any local or state public office. The same measure would require anyone elected or appointed to a public body in the state be a legal resident of Georgia.

Raffensperger, R-Johns Creek, is an engineer elected in special balloting earlier this year after Gov. Nathan Deal appointed House District 50 incumbent Lynne Riley as the state’s revenue commissioner.

In another measure he prefiled for possible consideration in the upcoming legislative session, the metro Atlanta legislator proposes requiring anyone “appointed to serve on an authority, school district, commission, council, or board for a local governing body … [be] …. a citizen of the United States and a legal resident of the jurisdiction being served for one year immediately preceding such appointment.” That same bill would mandate that no one who is not a U.S. citizen, and who has not lived in the state for at least four years, could be appointed to serve on any state “authority, board, council or commission.”

Raffensperger’s prefiled proposals came just days after state Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, prefiled a proposal calling for a statewide referendum on amending the state constitution to make English the official language of the state of Georgia.

Among other legislation prefiled in recent days is a proposal from Sen. Michael “Doc” Rhett, a Marietta Democrat, that would make it a misdemeanor for anyone involved in divorce proceedings to attempt to purchase a firearm, unless the person has written permission from the judge presiding over the case. In Georgia, misdemeanors are punishable with a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in jail.

Also on the 2016 Agenda will be fighting over the public schools funding formula.

The Education Reform Commission, which has more than 30 members, recently completed its work and passed its report to Gov. Nathan Deal. One of the key parts of the commission’s report was a new funding formula to replace the three-decade old Quality Basic Education formula.

“At its outset, I charged the commission with providing recommendations to improve education, increase access to early learning programs, recruit and retain high-quality instructors and expand school options for students and families,” Deal said in a statement earlier this month. “I look forward to reviewing their recommendations as to how we might achieve these goals.”

Former University of Georgia President Charles Knapp, who chaired the commission, said the report responds to the governor’s charge and provides bold recommendations that will better prepare students for life and the workforce.

The formula includes a quarter of a billion dollars of additional “new money” allocated for K-12, a 3 percent jump from this year’s budget, which was more than $8 billion. Under the current formula, the state salary schedule is based on years of experience and education degrees. The new proposal would require each school system to have its own schedule, while the state would offer a template including minimum requirements. Pay for performance being on the table has drawn some criticism from teachers’ advocacy groups as Deal has favored at least a portion of salaries be based on performance.

Greg Bluestein of the AJC takes a look at this year’s Savannah elections for Mayor and City Council.

Edna Jackson, the city’s first black female leader, became the first incumbent mayor defeated here in 20 years, beaten by a conservative business owner. Two other black female contenders for the City Council were rejected by voters. They, too, fell to a pair of graying, white candidates.

That’s a seismic electoral shift in a city with a population that’s 55 percent black — minority voters who typically overwhelmingly support Democrats in Georgia — and hadn’t elected a Republican-leaning mayor since 1991. Sea change, indeed.

If national elections are typically about the economy, Savannah contests have long revolved around public safety. And the incoming mayor, Eddie DeLoach, capitalized on concerns about crime to build a new coalition he hopes will endure.

Crime rates that had leveled off during Jackson’s first three years in office soared in 2015. The number of homicides nearly doubled over the past year, making it Savannah’s bloodiest since 1991, and violent crime grew by more than 20 percent.

DeLoach pounced on those concerns. At the first debate, when asked to name the city’s top three challenges, he answered succinctly: crime, crime and crime. He vowed to fill the number of vacancies in the Police Department — at one point, the number had swelled to 100 openings — and pledged to hire 15 additional officers to a new violent crime unit.

Michelle Hall will run for a Hall County State Court seat being vacated by Chief Judge Charles S. Wynne, who is retiring at the end of his term.