Four years ago, Republicans claimed every statewide office in Georgia.
This year, Democrats are making a new run at giving Georgia a two-party government. It will be a tense election year for Georgia, with seats at stake for the governor, the open U.S. Senate seat of retiring Republican Saxby Chambliss, 56 state senators and 180 state representatives all on the ballot.
Today the Times endorses two of those Democrats.
Governor: Jason Carter
Gov. Nathan Deal is seeking re-election but faces blazing competition from state Sen. Jason Carter, grandson of former Georgia governor and President Jimmy Carter. Young Carter's run has energized Democrats who are hoping that changing demographics will transform Georgia's political landscape. Two recent polls show the race in a tie.
Carter remained in the Senate for the recent session to work, forgoing an opportunity to raise money. He had work to do in the state Capitol as the most visible opponent to Deal's legislative agenda, which has been to slight education, undermine Common Core standards, ignore health and ACA realities and deny Georgia state ethics problems.
Carter, who once served in the Peace Corps to work on education issues in South Africa, is endorsed by the Georgia Association of Educators, a group representing more than 42,000 Georgia teachers. The group cited "chronic underfunding and dismantling" of public education in the state.
Deal, on the other hand, is front and center in a state ethics debacle. In a debate last week Deal denied claims that he helped squash an ethics investigation into his 2010 campaign. Former ethics commission chief, Stacey Kalberman, and three of her staffers alleged they were pushed out from their jobs for investigating Deal. A jury agreed and awarded Kalberman a million dollars. The state subsequently settled with her three staffers for another $2 million. Deal denied any involvement, but Carter has previously pointed out Deal's office helped hire Kalberman's replacement while she was still leading the agency. Furthermore, Georgia's attorney general was fined $10,000 for withholding key documents related to settling the ethics case against Deal.
Deal crows that ethics complaints against him were dismissed by the commission. But that happened only after the governor's office interfered with the probe, according to documents.
As incumbent, Deal made a unilateral decision to spurn $33.7 million over 10 years from the Affordable Care Act and not expand Medicaid for the poorest Georgians. His clearly partisan action prevented hundreds of thousands of Georgia citizens from receiving insurance and adequate health care and effectively killed 70,000 private sector jobs, according to a recent Georgia State University report. The state's unemployment rate recently fell to worst in the country.
Carter has made health care the key issue in his race against Deal: "Every single day, our governor takes $9 million in our taxpayer money - our tax dollars that we pay to the federal government, $9 million a day - that he sends off to other states to give health care to those people, and denies it to 600,000 people in Georgia," Carter said at a September campaign stop in Savannah.
Deal, on the other hand, has talked only about the cost of expansion, and ignored the facts of what he's thrown away.
"We simply cannot afford the $2.5 billion [over 10 years] in new spending that expansion would require," said Deal spokeswoman Sasha Dlugolenski. "The expansion costs money the state does not have."
In a worst-case scenario, Deal was misrepresenting costs and benefits out of partisan blindness. In a best-case scenario, he and the state government he manages are so inept they cannot correctly compute future costs and revenues.
Either way, the clear choice is Jason Carter.
U.S. Senator: Michelle Nunn
Republican David Perdue and Democratic opponent Michelle Nunn both have self-styled themselves as political "outsiders" - something that seems funny since they both come from long-time Georgia political families.
Nunn is the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn, a moderate who represented Georgia for years. Perdue is the first cousin of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, who in 2003 became the first Republican governor of Georgia since Reconstruction.
Both also cite each other's lack of political experience as proof positive that the other cannot accomplish anything in Washington.
Perdue is a former CEO of Dollar General Corp., and Nunn is a nonprofit executive on leave as CEO of former President George H.W. Bush's Points of Light foundation, which coordinates various volunteer efforts.
Nunn, 47, has said votes for Perdue could make him "the only senator who would have built his career around outsourcing jobs," referring to a 2005 court deposition that surfaced recently in which he discusses his experience with outsourcing at companies like Haggar, Sara Lee and Pillowtex Corp.
"My record, obviously, is around building communities, lifting people up, trying to make a difference, working in collaboration with folks from the other side," she said.
Perdue, 64, downplays Nunn's resume as inferior to his. He said her experience "does not prepare you, in my mind, to deal with issues we have in a free-enterprise system."
Republicans need six seats to regain a Senate majority and today's razor-thin poll numbers between Nunn and Perdue have made the race an all-out brawl.
Nunn is the best and only choice.