Only one half of the Senate match-up in Georgia has been settled: Michelle Nunn won the Democratic nomination essentially unopposed. Well, she faced three other Democrats, but they didn't exist as far as media coverage of the race was concerned. The proof? Unless you're from DeKalb County (home of runner-up, former state senator Steen Miles) or a member of the Board of Trustees of the Georgia Psychiatric Physicians Association (on which fourth place finisher Dr. Branko Radulovacki sat from 2007 to 2009), you don't recognize the names of any of the other candidates. (There's also a chance you read the Wikipedia article on the election, but even then the third place finisher, former U.S. Army Ranger Todd Robinson, doesn't have his own Wikipedia article, which is totally a good judge of notability.)
While Nunn is now settling in as the official nominee, I think it's useful to point out why she was nominated so easily despite having no experience in politics. If you've been reading along, you'll recall my post on the effect of being related to other famous politicians on one's electoral chances. You should click the link to read more, but the tl;dr is that while candidates with famous names have historically won larger percentages of the vote in their first statewide elections, I wasn't willing to conclude that they would win their nominations and then the elections (if that were the case, Democrats would almost certainly be keeping the Senate for at least two more years, picking up Kentucky and Georgia). What I did propose, however, was that candidates with those famous names (such as Nunn or Carter in Georgia) receive more support from the party establishment, which is a euphemism for "dynasty brings in the dough". That was the explanation I offered for why some candidates were so quickly established as front runners in their primaries, and the eventual results from last week corroborate: in the Senate primaries in Kentucky and Georgia, Sec. of State Alison Lundergan Grimes and Nunn respectively won with three-quarters of the Democratic vote, while in the Georgia gubernatorial race state senator Jason Carter won the Democratic primary unopposed (and this time actually unopposed, with 100% of the vote), despite the vulnerability of incumbent Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.
But what the dynastic hypothesis doesn't explain is the relative non-success of Georgia Ports Authority board member David Perdue, a first cousin of former Gov. Sonny Perdue, in the Republican primary. Don't get me wrong--first place in a seven-way primary is still good. But David Perdue won first place with only 30% of the vote, a somewhat middling performance given that only two other candidates were actually viable. Those two other candidates were second place finisher Rep. Jack Kingston, who advances to the runoff, and third place finisher former Sec. of State Karen Handel, who gets to go home and tell everyone how she once received an endorsement from Sarah Palin.
Here's the problem with our proposal for names: David Perdue did surprisingly poorly in attracting state Republican donors. He and Rep. Kingston raised about $3.6 million during the cycle, but while the vast majority of Rep. Kingston's war chest was accumulated from individual donors and PACs, over half of the money that David Perdue raised was from his own wallet, which has become pretty hefty from his stints as CEO of Dollar General and Reebok. As a result, Rep. Kingston has about three times as much cash on hand as David Perdue does. This is exactly the opposite of what his last name would predict: he should have won handily, just like Nunn did in her primary.
What's the difference, then, between Michelle Nunn and David Perdue? On the one hand, David Perdue's political connection, Gov. Sonny Perdue, was a force in Georgia politics as recently as 2011, the year he was term-limited and replaced by current Gov. Nathan Deal. With that in mind, you might expect David Perdue to win his primary even more easily than Nunn won hers.
Several things, however, might have made primary season easier on Nunn than on David Perdue. First, her relation is closer: parent-child is as close as blood relation gets. Second, Sen. Nunn won his elections by consistently larger margins than Gov. Perdue did--Sen. Nunn's "sophomore surge" brought him from an eight-point margin of victory in 1972 to a 67-point blowout in 1978, while Gov. Perdue's surge brought him from a similarly narrow five-point margin in 2002 to "only" a 20-point victory in 2006. Third, Michelle Nunn is actually running for her father's old seat (retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss originally won the seat from Sen. Max Cleland, who replaced Sen. Nunn after he retired in 1997), while David Perdue is running for a seat his cousin never held.
Fourth, and most importantly, we have to remember the reason famous names help candidates: viability. The surname grants the appearance of viability to a candidate who might otherwise have very little, giving the candidate a boost among donors and possibly generating more enthusiasm among the voting base. However, her last name meant that Michelle Nunn was pretty much the only viable candidate in the Democratic pool, allowing her to win her nomination easily. Perdue, on the other hand, had to compete against other equally viable candidates, and some who, while not viable (you know the two), were at least well-known. Thus the viability boost his name gave him didn't go nearly as far. We'll have to wait and see on July 22, when the runoff is held, which one trumps--Rep. Kingston's fundraising or David Perdue's last name. Until then, Michelle Nunn has a free hand. TOSS-UP
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