According to a new Democracy Corps poll in Georgia, Sen. John McCain leads Sen. Barack Obama by just two points, 46% to 44%.
As McCain himself might say, my friends, this is not good. Georgia should not be close. Ultimately, John McCain cannot afford to lose any electoral votes, but losing something like Montana or North Dakota is not necessarily fatal. Losing states like North Carolina and Georgia, which have a lot more electoral votes, is just terrible news. The ultimate irony of this election might well be that Obama wins more votes in the South than anyone since Jimmy Carter. I don't think anyone saw that coming.
In a greater sense, though, I think this election will see the GOP in some really dire straits. They internally predict a 30 seat loss, it could easily be 50. This means that the Democrats would have around 290 votes (2/3) and would probably control the House for a generation. The Senate is not much better. And there's the little matter of the White House, of course. The Republican Party is not going to want to moderate--indeed, it will be even more conservative after this election--and it is going to figure that Bush screwed up because he wasn't conservative enough and that they can just wait it out before the nation turns rightward again. Maybe they're right, but the coming generation and the influx of Latinos are going to change the political landscape. And if the GOP can't even win Georgia convincingly, its situation in politics is hopeless--it's going to be like the British Labour Party during the 1980s.
