Georgia primary voice may get lost in the din of Feb. 5

From the Athens Banner-Herald:

In 1992, Bill Clinton, who lost the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, knew he'd need a win in the South to keep his campaign alive.

So he called his friend, then-Gov. Zell Miller, and asked him to move up the Georgia primary one week, to third in the nation. Miller did, and Clinton won - the last time Georgia voters have influenced a nomination.

"We became, as people said back then, the New Hampshire of the South," University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock said.

Not any more. In 1996, 2000 and 2004, pretty much everyone knew who would win before Georgians got a chance to vote.

Georgians will vote earlier this year, on Feb. 5, than they have in the past, but their voices could be drowned out by all the other states striving for a bigger role in picking the nominees.

Last year, in an effort to give Georgia more influence, the state legislature voted to move Georgia's presidential primary up to the first Tuesday in February - the 5th, this year - joining 22 other states on what's been dubbed "Super Duper Tuesday."

With half the country voting on the same day, candidates can pay less attention to each state and will focus on the largest states, especially New York, California and Illinois. Georgia is the fourth most populous state where voters will cast primary ballots Feb. 5.

Already, most of the candidates have visited Georgia, but not nearly as often as they did Iowa and New Hampshire, where most candidates have virtually lived for months, or even Florida, which has more delegates up for grabs than Georgia and primaries that are a week earlier.

"I don't think we'll get a whole lot of attention," Bullock said. "We may have been better off hanging back a week or leaving it where it was, when it was a month later."

By that time, though, the races will almost surely be decided. Political experts said this election is the most unpredictable in decades, but a winner on the Democratic side, and possibly the even less settled Republican side, will likely emerge Feb. 6.

Political scientists said they expect states to continue trying to one-up each other, especially since state leaders learned they can ignore the national parties' wishes when scheduling primaries. And being first matters even more than being big.