Chambliss gets comfortable win in Georgia runoff

NY Times:

Saxby Chambliss, a first-term Republican senator, was re-elected by Georgia voters on Tuesday in a substantial victory, ending Democratic hopes for a 60-vote majority in the Senate that would make it difficult for Republicans to filibuster the Obama administration’s legislative agenda.

With 93 percent of the state’s precincts reporting in Tuesday’s runoff election, Mr. Chambliss had 58 percent of the vote, and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin, had 42 percent. The margin was far greater than the three percentage points that separated the two men in the Nov. 4 election, when neither got the required 50 percent. Many of the Democrats who turned out last month in enthusiastic support of Barack Obama apparently did not show up at the polls on Tuesday.

“For a lot of African-American voters, the real election was last month,” said Merle Black, an expert in Southern politics at Emory University. “The importance of electing the first African-American president in history generated enormous enthusiasm. Everything else was anticlimactic.”

A little more than two million people voted in the runoff, compared with 3.7 million on Nov. 4. In heavily black Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, Mr. Martin’s vote was less than half what it was in the earlier election. Only 9.2 percent of registered Georgians cast early votes in the runoff, compared with 36 percent in the general election.

Mr. Chambliss, 65, a pro-business conservative, campaigned in the runoff on a platform of limiting Mr. Obama’s ability to pass legislation in a Democratic-controlled Congress, and many voters interviewed Tuesday said the balance of power in the Senate had been an important factor in their choice of a candidate.

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I think this bodes well for Republicans in the 2010 races where Obama want be on the ticket to generate the turnout he did in November of this year. Chambliss's margin of victory is also an indication of the enthusiasm that people like Gov. Palin brought to the race. I suspect we will see more of her in coming elections getting the base fired up.