Eaton upsets Burgess -- Now we have a little more history by which to gauge future contests

From InsiderAdvantage Georgia:

Four weeks ago, Eaton trailed Burgess 46.3 percent to 48.8 percent with a Libertarian accounting for 4.9 percent of the vote. It takes 50 percent to avoid a runoff in Georgia. Even so, general election runoffs are rare, the University of Georgia’s Dr. Charles Bullock pointed out in an InsiderAdvantage column earlier this week [see 12-4-06 post], so there wasn’t much history to suggest how this race would turn out. (In primary elections, where there is a lot of history, incumbents pushed into a runoff generally don’t survive. But the data pertains only to primaries.)

The most famous general election runoff in Georgia was the one in which then-U.S. Sen. Wyche Fowler failed to reach 50 percent and lost the runoff to the late Paul Coverdell. So now we have a little more history by which to gauge future contests.

The question now, though, is how Eaton’s presence will affect decisions of the PSC. The man he replaces was the swing vote who often sided with Commissioners Stan Wise and Doug Everett against Bobby Baker and Angela Speir. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which editorially advised against the Democrat’s re-election, argued that Burgess had voted “with Wise and Everett on behalf of utilities and against the interests of Georgia citizens.”

What we know about Eaton is that he is a 37-year-old realtor from Atlanta who campaigned heavily on the rise in natural gas prices in Georgia and what he called the need for the PSC to seek innovative ways to reduce customers’ bills, including fostering the development of alternative fuels. The coming months will tell us more.