Republican David Perdue has jumped ahead of Democrat Michelle Nunn in the Georgia Senate race, according to a new Survey USA poll released on Monday.
The poll, released a day before the Nov. 4 midterm election, found Perdue leading Nunn 47 percent to 44 percent. Libertarian candidate Amanda Swafford, meanwhile, got 5 percent support, the poll found.
A previous SurveyUSA poll found Nunn leading Perdue 46 percent to 44 percent with another 4 percent going to Swafford.
Although the latest SurveyUSA poll results are good news for Perdue, they also add to the case that a runoff is likely to happen between Nunn and him as neither candidate is getting a majority of the vote.
The poll was conducted among 591 likely voters between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
The TPM Polltracker average finds Perdue leading the rest of the field by 5.3 points.
It seems like Georgia is turning more purple than the ruby red it has been in the last ten years (twenty if Zell Miller is an aberration - with the small exception of Max Cleland in 1996).
I wonder if Amanda Swafford sees more oxygen in the room for a 3rd party race due to some increasing demographic change. Georgia likely has to see some serious juice from a 3rd party candidate for a couple of statewide elections to fully elect someone outside of the typical two parties. So maybe that is contributing to her tenacity with this campaign.
Then again, I’m not deeply familiar with Swafford. She is running for Senate as a Libertarian, so maybe it’s just the same combination of eccentric/rich and a stubborn refusal to “play the game” in the nominating process that motivated her. Or for all I know she was hoping to be another Greg Orman.
But this is particularly interesting to me, because I’ve seen how much ATL has changed just in the last 5-10 years, and 5-10 years from now it will be all the more different. And that really impacts a lot of races, from the Presidential to a slew of statewide contests from formerly-solid-southern states abutting the Atlantic Coast (VA-NC-GA + FL). Watch this space.