Obama campaign shifting some people out of Georgia - deploying to NC

Obama campaign shifting some people out of Georgia
Will continue voter-registration drives

By JIM GALLOWAY, AARON GOULD SHEININ asheinin@ajc.com

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Nearly three weeks after dropping its TV ads, the Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama will shift personnel out of Georgia into more competitive states like North Carolina, staffers confirmed Tuesday.

The movement of resources reflects a quickly tightening, state-by-state race for the 270 electoral votes necessary to win the White House.

Campaign officials declined to specify how many of approximately 75 paid Obama staffers will be redeployed, and denied that the move signaled reduced expectations in the state.

“Even if a huge number of people left, we’d still have the largest presidential campaign staff in the history of the state of Georgia,” said Caroline Adelman, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Georgia.

Voter registration drives will continue apace, and two new campaign offices will be opened this week in south DeKalb County and Savannah, Adelman said.

Democrats in Georgia are counting on an Obama-driven surge of voters to halt a six-year decline up and down the ballot.

But Republicans have belittled claims by Obama supporters that Georgia, which hasn’t cast its electoral college votes for a Democrat since 1992, is seriously contested territory.

Since the January primary season, Obama has aired more than $2 million worth of television ads in state. Republican John McCain has spent his money elsewhere, but in statewide polls — the most recent nearly a month old — the Republican maintains an average lead of more than 6 percentage points, according to the web site RealClearPolitics.com, which tracks polling data.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican, issued a mocking invitation to Democrats, advising them to “spend as much money as possible in this state. Millions and millions of dollars.”

On Tuesday, it was the Republican National Committee’s turn to chortle. “After spending over $2 million dollars in ads and investing significant manpower, Barack Obama’s campaign has finally realized that his partisan record is out of step with the values of Georgia voters,” said RNC spokeswoman Katie Wright.

Even last month, at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe declared that Georgia remained one of 18 targeted “battleground” states.

But that was before McCain and Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, the GOP pick for vice president, received a substantial bump in national polls from last week’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

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