Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for March 24, 2014

King George III approved of the passage of the Stamp Act legislation on March 22, 1765 designed to pay for some of the costs the UK incurred in protecting the colonies, but it would lead to the movement that culminated in the American Revolution. No word on where the Myrmidons were on this.

Ten years and one day later, Patrick Henry addressed the Virginia Convention in Richmond on March 23, 1775, stating,  “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

On March 23, 1861, the Georgia Secession Convention adopted a new state Constitution to be submitted to a referendum of the voters on the first Tuesday in July and then adjourned.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Beer and Wine Revenue Act on March 22, 1933, allowing the sale of alcoholic beverages, and later that year, the federal Prohibition was ended.

The first Masters golf tournament began on March 22, 1934 in Augusta, Georgia.

The state prohibition on all alcoholic beverages ended on March 22, 1935 with Governor Eugene Talmadge’s signature of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Act.

Governor E.D. Rivers signed a resolution on March 24, 1939, calling for the return of “General” locomotive made famous in the Great Train Chase from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Georgia. It currently resides in The Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw, Georgia. The other locomotive involved in the chase, The Texas, is displayed at the Atlanta Cyclorama in Grant Park.

On March 24, 1970 the largemouth bass was recognized as the official state fish of Georgia.

The United States Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment on March 22, 1972; it would fail to garner enough state ratifications.

On March 23, 1972, in the case of Gooding v. Wilson, the United States Supreme Court held that a Georgia statute, OCGA § 26-6303, which provided: “Any person who shall, without provocation, use to or of another, and in his presence . . . opprobrious words or abusive language, tending to cause a breach of the peace . . . shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,” was unconstitutionally vague and violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan called for the development of an anti-missile system that would come to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

On March 24, 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound in Alaska, eventually spilling 11 million gallons of oil and polluting 700 miles of coastal Alaska.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

Statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has compiled a probabalistic model for the 2014 Senate elections and finds that the GOP will likely make some pickups in this year’s General Elections:

We think the Republicans are now slight favorites to win at least six seats and capture the chamber. The Democrats’ position has deteriorated somewhat since last summer, with President Obama’s approval ratings down to 42 or 43 percent from an average of about 45 percent before. Furthermore, as compared with 2010 or 2012, the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.

Factors considered by this FiveThirtyEight Model include:

The national environment. The single best measure of the national political environment, in our view, is the generic congressional ballot. Right now, it shows a rough tie between Democrats and Republicans. That stalemate likely reflects voters’ dislike for both Obama and the Republican Party.

A tie on the generic ballot might not sound so bad for Democrats. But it’s a misleading signal, for two reasons. First, most of the generic ballot polls were conducted among registered voters. Those do not reflect the turnout advantage the GOP is likely to have in November.

 

In 2010, the Republican turnout advantage amounted to the equivalent of 6 percentage points, meaning a tie on the generic ballot among registered voters translated into a six-point Republican lead among likely voters. The GOP’s edge hadn’t been quite that large in past years. But if the “enthusiasm gap” is as large this year as it was in 2010, Democrats will have a difficult time keeping the Senate.

 

Candidate quality. The notion of “candidate quality” might sound awfully subjective, but there are sound statistical ways to assess it. Fundraising totals, especially individual contributions, are a good indication of a candidate’s organizational strength. Various systems rate a candidate’s ideology on a left-right scale, based on her voting record or public issue statements, and we can compare those ratings against those of voters in her state. And candidates who have previously held elected office tend to outperform inexperienced ones, controlling for other factors.

 

State partisanship. As Dan Hopkins wrote at FiveThirtyEight last week, races of all kinds have become more and more correlated with presidential results in recent years. So the Partisan Voting Index (PVI), which compares how a state voted in the past two presidential years against the national popular vote, is also a useful tool for congressional races. At this early point in the cycle, there’s reason to be skeptical of races where the polls are out of step with how the state usually votes; states often revert to their partisan mean once more voters engage with the campaign.

Silver puts Georgia in the category of states that lean Republican but might go Democratic.

Georgia might be the slightly better opportunity [than Kentucky] for Democrats. The Republican primary, to be held May 20, has been a mess in the polling, with any of five different GOP candidates near the top of the race depending on the survey. Their prospects range from [former] Secretary of State Karen Handel, who might be the strongest general-election nominee, to Reps. Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, who have amassed conservative enough voting records that they might turn off swing voters even in red Georgia. Democrats are almost certain to nominate Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, who has run even with or slightly ahead of the Republicans in scant polling so far.

 

Ordinarily, we are skeptical of candidates who lack previous experience in elected office, but those from famous political families don’t have the same name-recognition deficit to overcome and can sometimes tap into their families’ networks to raise funds and staff their campaigns.

 

So our forecast might be thought of as a Republican gain of six seats — plus or minus five. The balance has shifted slightly toward the GOP. But it wouldn’t take much for it to revert to the Democrats, nor for this year to develop into a Republican rout along the lines of 2010.

Here’s Nate Silver on ABC News.

Speaking of Michelle Nunn, this weekend, she blew off yet another public appearance in favor of a private fundraiser.

And just how fancy of an event are we talking about here?  So fancy, that there is a $500-a-plate children’s table.  That must be some pretty chi chi macaroni and cheese.

At the same time she’s hob nobbing with some of Georgia’s wealthiest Democrats, the Georgia Gwinnett College Democrats will be hosting a Senate debate.  All of the candidates, including Nunn, were encouraged to attend.  Both State Senator Steen Miles and Dr. Branko Radulovacki, aka Dr. Rad, are attending.  But Nunn opted to shun the Georgia Gwinnett College Democrats – and really all Georgia voters – by declining the debate invitation and is instead shilling for cash with Reed.  So once again, Michelle Nunn is ducking Georgia voters – unless they have a healthy bank account, that is.

Jack Kingston has released what I believe to be his second television commercial of the primary.

The Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff weighs in on Common Core, calling it “Rotten to the Core.”

It’s one of the few things most liberals, moderates and conservatives are agreeing on: Common Core is a terrible idea.

 

[C]ritics from all points on the political spectrum share similar Common Core concerns: It undermines student individuality and teacher autonomy; puts too much emphasis on standardized tests; and sets the stage for a federal takeover of education.

 

Isn’t such a federal takeover illegal? Yes. The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act forbids the feds from meddling in school curriculum development.

 

But the federal government, as it does too often, found a loophole. A state that agrees to adopt Common Core curriculum increases its likelihood of winning a piece of the more than $4 billion in education grants under Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

 

Common Core proponents – money-hungry education bureaucrats, big-business lobbyists and establishment-entrenched politicians from both parties – have tried to discredit critics. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s condescension dripped like condensation last year when he characterized opponents as mostly “white suburban moms” who discovered “all of a sudden, their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought.”

 

On the contrary – some of Common Core’s most cogent criticism comes from scholars at leading think tanks from the left and right, including the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, the Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute.

Governor Nathan Deal appointed Suzanne Goddard Solicitor General for Muscogee County, elevating her from Chief Assistant Solicitor.

Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has written what is my favorite political story of the year so far about the rivalry between Governor Nathan Deal’s campaign, supporting the Mercer Bears, and the Jason Carter insurgency, supporting elitist Duke in the NCAA basketball tournament.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sceu4GXy9zY

In recognition of Mercer’s win, we will award +5 points for the first sighting of a Robot Photo/Video Bomb in a Georgia campaign or political event this year.

The City of Canton, in Cherokee County, appears poised to hire a new City Manager whom two-thirds of the City Council believe is unqualified for the job.

Legislative Review

I’m still working on the omnibus legislative review, including some more on the Medicinal CBD (Cannabidiol Oil) bill that failed. But I want to talk a little bit now about how our state legislature functioned this year, and how it functions most years.

Despite sky-high, and perhaps half-baked, expectations about the passage of legislation permitting the use of Medicinal CBD oil, experience tells us that the chance of any piece of legislation passing the Georgia General Assembly in any given year are between 1 in 5 and 1 in 20. The bicameral legislature is an American invention designed to impede legislatures from passing bills.

Let me say that again: the reason we have two chambers in the Congress and the General Assembly is to make it more difficult to pass legislation. This is a structural feature of American bicameral legislatures. We shouldn’t be surprised when it works, and legislation fails to pass.

History teaches us this is so. From Federalist Number 62:

Another advantage accruing from this ingredient in the constitution of the senate, is the additional impediment it must prove against improper acts of legislation.

 

The necessity of a senate is not less indicated by the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies, to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders, into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.

 

Another defect to be supplied by a senate lies in a want of due acquaintance with the objects and principles of legislation. It is not possible that an assembly of men called for the most part from pursuits of a private nature, continued in appointment for a short time, and led by no permanent motive to devote the intervals of public occupation to a study of the laws, the affairs and the comprehensive interests of their country, should, if left wholly to themselves, escape a variety of important errors in the exercise of their legislative trust.

While Georgia’s bicameral legislature differs from the Congress in that Senators serve the same terms as Representatives, it is clear that Georgia’s legislature was modeled on the federal system, that the Senate was instituted to provide an impediment to the House, and that when a bicameral legislature is functioning as it was intended, the result will be fewer bills passing, rather than more.

Read that third paragraph from the Federalist 62 again, where it says that a part-time legislature, as the United States House of Representatives originally was constituted, is prone to “a variety of important errors in the exercise of their legislative trust.”

Am I the only person to whom it has occurred that each Session of the Georgia General Assembly includes at least one incidence of going back and “fixing” something from the last legislature?

Senator Josh McKoon introduced Senate Resolution 876, which would have had the effect of slowing down voting on conference committee reports, which is where much of the sausage is made in the legislature. That resolution didn’t go anywhere, but here’s my two cents. I’d like to see the General Assembly go to a two-year cycle, where the vast majority of bills are required to be introduced in the first year of a legislative session and are eligible for final passage only in the second year, unless a case is made convincingly that it must be passed on a shorter timeline. That would leave more time for the perfection of legislation. If our state has survived this long without whatever bills are being proposed, can’t it wait another year to do it right?

Events Calendar

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Newton County GOP: Meeting with Stan Edwards & Jeff Meadows

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Coweta County GOP: State School Superintendent Forum

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Walton County GOP: Meeting With Gov. Nathan Deal & LG Casey Cagle

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Barry Morgan: Fundraiser

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Cherokee YR: Meeting with Broun Campaign, Allen Levene & Joseph Robert

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GA Public Policy Foundation: Georgia Legislative Roundup

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Atlanta YR: Judicial Forum

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Savannah Area Young Republicans: Meet The Candidates

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GA GOP 10th District: Congressional Debate

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Bibb County GOP: Meeting with Handel, Jones, & Pennington

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Fayette County GOP: Gov. Nathan Deal Family Night Spaghetti Dinner

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Republican Women of Hall County: Breakfast with Local Legislative Delegation

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Clarke County GOP: Meeting with Gov. Nathan Deal

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GA GOP: US Senate Debate – Savannah

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GA GOP 12th District: GOP Primary Debate – U.S. Congress

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GA GOP 10th District: Congressional Debate in Sandersville

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