aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Will Whitehead self-destruct in Georgia’s 10th?

Facing South notes that two special elections are coming up in the South, one of them in Georgia. That election will be to fill the 10th Congressional District seat left vacant when Republican Rep. Charlie Norwood passed from lung cancer in February.

From Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

The race to replace kicks off with an unusual free-for-all open primary on June 19th in which six Republicans and three Democrats will compete on the same ballot. A runoff will be held four weeks later on July 17th in the likely event that none of the candidates garners 50 percent or more of the vote.

For most of the race, Norwood’s heir apparent has been State Senator Jim Whitehead, who hails from Norwood’s area north of Augusta and has kept most potential rivals at bay and out of the running. Recently, though, he has been suffering from a bad case of foot-in-mouth syndrome. In a column that appeared in The Elberton Star, Whitehead admitted suggesting that someone “probably ought to bomb” the University of Georgia--sparing the football team, of course. Then, in a March 26 letter to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Whitehead claimed that liberals have been registering “known al-Qaida terrorists” to vote.

This is the district rejiggered to knock out Athens Democrat John Barrow last time around. It made Barrow’s district more Republican and removed his Athens hometown altogether. His own home no longer in his district, Barrow moved to Savannah. And won by a hair - despite being called an “outsider” in Republican attack ads.

That leaves the 10th District with the more liberal Athens, though it’s still not expected to go Blue:

Democrats are hoping to take advantage of the battle royal on the Republican side and have mostly united behind former Yahoo! Executive Jim Marlow. If divisions among Republicans can keep Whitehead from reaching the 50 percent he needs to escape a runoff, and enough Democrats from Athens make it out to the polls, then Marlow could well become number two vote getter and advance to the runoff. From there, Democrats’ victory recipe calls for Marlow’s free spending and Whitehead’s self-destruction.