The Georgia Senate race is not one to write off.  Obama's folks are down here in a big way in North, Central, and Southern Georgia.  Voters are being registered all over the place and many polls show Obama residing within single digits.  Note that with some historical under-representations around the state, we really don't know what a likely voter is. For example, have a good look at this map:

GA Gubernatorial Map

There are some interesting facts in the above map.  For one, the Democrat did not carry Chatham County, which is home to Savannah and usually a Democratic stronghold.  There are also at least a couple of majority black counties that did not swing blue.  In other words, Jim Martin has nowhere to go but up from his previous performance.

Also, it is important to note that over four months of rather low key campaigning (via the primary, where independents haven't gotten a whole lot of love), Martin has made an impressive improvement from 22 points below Chambliss to 13 points below.  And this is with a Democratic electorate that was all over the place.

I'm not the only one to think that Martin has a chance at this thing.  Martin has some name ID that you wouldn't expect from a State House member thanks to his run for Lieutenant Governor in 2006.  And he certainly didn't get much help from Mark Taylor on that particular run - Martin outperformed him by 76,000 votes in an election decided by 2,000,000.  2006 was a pretty rough year for Georgia Democrats, as the hang-over from losing their one-party rule status was in full swing.

When he announced, Jim picked up about $350,000 on his first day.  His fundraising has proceeded steadily at about $500,000 per quarter since.  In a relatively short period of time, he established himself as the frontrunner in the primary, even though he split his support base with three other candidates against a man who spent a year building up name recognition and support around the state.  And he also had all four aiming the guns at him, especially with Dale Cardwell and Vernon Jones teaming up to tear him down on issues with the Department of Human Resources (which he opened up to public scrutiny as part of an effort to improve it).

Jim is up to doing the work he needs to do.  He was tireless in traversing the state two years ago, and he will certainly know how to do this again.

In a conservative state, Martin has managed to work in a fairly progressive direction, and you can see this in the links I have provided just below.

This is a good place to hear a few clips of Jim speaking on the news and see what he has to say about the state of Georgia and his vision for going forward.  The time in the Georgia State House is also worth having a look at.  The legislation page is kind of hectic, but you can tell who he affected by the list of citations and awards he has on the website there.

Again, even without the ability to campaign in general election mode, Jim already has this race as competitive as several others around the country.  True, Saxby has yet to unload his hit squad on Jim, but the benefits of consolidating the Democratic electorate have also yet to kick in.

Saxby is only a one-term incumbent, so he is hardly a Georgia icon.  Further, Saxby has pissed off a few people around the state, especially Republicans.  Let's take his work with Imperial Sugar.  Or perhaps the fact that Saxby likes to talk a fair game about Border Security and detainment to his xenophobic fans, but is pretty happy to turn over their jobs to foreign labor in the most exploitive fashions.

So, the man is not a lock by any means.  However, he is working to get himself wormed into the Senate so that he can stay there for quite some time after this particular election.

Jim Martin is a good replacement for Saxby on our Road to 60 Senators.  Further, I would hope that the netroots have a special digust for the man that typified the way that Republicans impugned the patriotism of anyone that refused to think a moment before bombing a country that had nothing to do with any attacks on us.  We here in Georgia would like to take that disgust and turn it into an example of what happens to those that run the playbook of fear and smear.

So, two final links:

Martin website

Martin ActBlue page

Thanks for letting me pimp a great Southern candidate.  I hope to do so more in the future.