Poll shows Chambliss could be vulnerable

A new poll in Georgia shows Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) could be vulnerable to a strong Democratic challenger and that his current challenger is closer than many expected him to be.

The poll, conducted by independent Atlanta-based Insider Advantage and released Friday, shows Chambliss edging former Gov. Roy Barnes (D) 42-40. Barnes has not shown interest in the race, but he was used as a baseline sample for a well-known statewide Democrat.

In a second set of results, Chambliss is beating DeKalb County CEO Vernon Jones 48-31. That is significantly closer than the 57-29 result shown by a Strategic Vision poll from early April. Jones has established an exploratory committee for the race and will make an official announcement this summer.

The poll was conducted Tuesday and Wednesday among 500 registered voters in the state. “It doesn’t mean that Chambliss is in serious trouble,” Insider Advantage CEO Matt Towery said. “Although I think it does show that he is a candidate who will have to work to reacquaint himself with the public here. He has very weak name ID.”

The Jones camp hailed the results as proof that he can be competitive with Chambliss. The state has not been high on the Democrats’ target list, as the national party has focused more on states like Texas and Kentucky.

“I have not officially announced at this point and already you’re seeing that the race is closing in,” Jones told The Hill. “Clearly, a lot of it has to do with Saxby not being in touch with Georgians, and the prime example is the immigration issue.”

The poll did not measure anything concerning immigration. Chambliss was recently booed by members of his party while defending the Senate’s immigration bill, which includes a path to citizenship and a guest-worker program.

Jones, who is running as a conservative Democrat, criticized him for his immigration stance this week. Jones favors an enforcement-first approach.

Towery pointed out that Chambliss did not lose many Republican voters but suggested that the 17 percent of independent voters that favored Jones and the 25 percent that favored Barnes might reflect discontent with what is happening in Washington.

Barnes and Jones both garnered 67.9 percent of the black vote, while Jones, who is black, got about 10 percent less of the white vote.

Some Democrats in the state have been recruiting Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) to run against Chambliss, but Marshall has not shown much interest in the race. The poll did not include a comparison of how Marshall would fare against Chambliss.

It’s hard to tell which way Kingston may flop. He seems to straddle the fence. Here’s what he had to say about one of his less than smart moves.

[snip] Instead of being applauded for enforcing the law, the INS came under attack from Georgia’s congressional delegation. Georgia’s two senators and three of its House members, led by then-Sen. Paul Coverdell (R) and Rep. Jack Kingston (R), complained in a letter to Washington that the INS did not understand the needs of America’s farmers. The raids stopped.

Sen. Paul Coverdell condemned the INS for its “military-style” raid “against honest farmers,” calling it “an indiscriminate and inappropriate use of extreme enforcement tactics.”
He then insisted the INS not raid Georgia agricultural fields and crafted a ‘temporary work’ program for the state of Georgia with the INS that allowed undocumented workers to stay ‘legally’ in the U.S. The same has happened in other states like Oregon, and Washington at the insistence of their elected representatives.

Before that incident, the INS had been arresting and deporting almost 1,500 illegal immigrants a month. By 2003 workplace arrests of illegal immigrants for the entire year totaled 445. In 2004, just three businesses nationwide were fined for employing illegal immigrants. In 1999, the United States initiated fines against 417 companies.

The Macon Telegraph described the episode, “ Farmers and immigration officials came to terms on migrant labor issues Friday morning, ending the siege on Georgia’s sweet onion fields. But a storm of criticism from the state’s congressional delegation of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s action is brewing on the horizon. Eight members of Congress signed an angry letter Friday afternoon to three of the Clinton administration’s top cabinet officers, blasting the INS for its timing”

Said Doris Meissner, INS commissioner from 1993 to 2000: “Those things affect an agency’s morale. You go out of your way to make it work, then it comes to nothing. Very demoralizing.”

Republican Rep. Jack Kingston has since stated “Employers in roofing and poultry and other areas will say, `Immigrants will work longer and harder,’ “ he said. Still, he has moved from being one of the 1998 defenders of the onion growers — “For us, it was just constituent work,” he said — to becoming an outspoken proponent of get-tough immigrant proposals.
Now, he said he believes businesses should be required to verify an employee’s legal status. He also is in favor of harsher penalties for employers who violate immigration laws.

He doesn’t, however, think such sanctions will be part of any new bill.

“The business lobby,” he said, “is too strong.”

Lobbyist and White house guru, Grover Norquist, a force behind the verification weakening, said: “The idea was that our job is to enforce the present rules that don’t work — rather than change the rules.”

Or in Norquist’s case, just do away with any border/immigration enforcement.

By 2000, according to INS figures, the estimated number of illegal immigrants had risen to 7 million, from 3.5 million in 1990.

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