As in Senate races across the country this year, much of the closing argument Sunday in the surprisingly competitive Georgia Senate race wasn’t about either candidate, but the president.
Meeting for the final debate before voters head to the polls Tuesday, Republican David Perdue focused most of his remarks on President Obama, charging that the president wants Democrat Michelle Nunn “in the Senate because she will fight for his failed policies.
“It just seems to me that this president is adamant about getting you in the Senate to be his rubber stamp,” Perdue told Nunn.
But Nunn, a first-time candidate, emphasized her connections to another president, as she has for much of the campaign: Former President George H.W. Bush, for whose nonprofit she worked as CEO.
“I have spent 45 minutes in my life with President Obama,” Nunn said. “I spent 7 years working for President George H.W. Bush’s Points Of Light Foundation, and I spent 47 years with my father,” the former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn.
Nunn has used Bush’s image in some advertisements, prompting the former president, who has endorsed Perdue, to ask that the ads be pulled.
Perdue has intimated in response that Nunn is not genuinely expressing openness to working with Republicans, but hiding her partisanship.
“In the middle of the game, you can’t change your jersey just because your team’s losing,” he said Sunday.
And indeed, Nunn would not engage on some of the most controversial Democratic policies, including answering whether she would have voted for Obamacare in 2010.
“We should and must change things that are not working,” Nunn said. “But I believe we should not go backwards.”
An NBC News/Marist poll released Friday showed Perdue leading Nunn by four points, but with neither candidate breaking the 50-percent plane. If that holds, the race would extend into a run-off, to be decided at the beginning of January.
A run-off scenario could bring tens of millions of dollars flowing into Georgia if a Senate majority hangs in the balance after Election Day.
That Georgia, a historically Republican state, has even emerged as a key battleground in this midterm election cycle has been something of a surprise. But Nunn has centered her campaign on a moderate message, and has attempted to associate Perdue with Republican lawmakers in Congress whom many Americans have come to view as obstructionist.
“You are a new face, but you perpetuate the same level of gridlock,” Nunn told Perdue on Sunday.
Whether Nunn is ultimately successful will hinge in large part on voter turnout Tuesday and in a possible run-off election. Democrats have poured considerable resources into reshaping the electorate in Georgia to look more like that of a presidential election, with particular focus on bringing African-Americans to the polls.
The effort has so far been successful, and African-Americans have comprised roughly 30 percent of the early voting electorate.
