Decatur Metro

With Iowa’s caucus so darn early this year (Jan. 3rd!) and the holiday blur nearly upon us, we have but a few days remaining before this seemingly never-ending primary season finally puts petal to metal. All media eyes are on Iowa and New Hampshire these days, as Obama finally makes his move on Clinton and Huckabee pulls ahead of the GOP nominees.

But what’s going on in our state of Georgia? After Sonny pushed our primary up to Super Tuesday (Feb 5th), all the big name candidates have been adding Georgia to their travel plans. Don’t you remember Rudy’s encounter with the vocal Ron Paul-fest in Marietta a couple weeks back?

But no one is talking about Georgia’s political landscape. Yes, it may be too soon. Yes, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as Iowa or New Hampshire. But there are no more debates before Iowa, so I was curious to see what Georgia voters where thinking before the horse race begun.

Lucky for me, so were the pollsters over at Strategic Vision, which recently conducted a poll of 800 Georgians and gaged their support for candidates in the upcoming primaries.

Here’s the run down as of Dec. 7th-9th (with a 3 point margin of error)…

Republicans

Mike Huckabee 23%
Fred Thompson 20%
Rudy Giuliani 17%
John McCain 11%
Mitt Romney 10%
Ron Paul 4%

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 34%
Barack Obama 27%
John Edwards 12%
Bill Richardson 5%
Joseph Biden 2%

Overall, the Georgia landscape seems to be following the current national trend, with a couple of exceptions. Though Obama is now challenging Clinton in many of the early primary states, he still lags in many of the later primary states, where voters still lean toward picking the candidate they already know. Not really the case in Georgia. Here he’s already within 7 points of Clinton. This could be due, in part, to the state’s strong percentage of registered African-Americans (28%).

The other difference in comparison to national polls is FredThompson’s strength. Though Huckabee now leads the Republican pack by 2 points in the Georgia, Thompson makes a strong showing here that he can’t seem to find elsewhere. I guess folks down south don’t appreciate Rudy’s philandering/pro-choice stance and Mitt’s creepy religion and anchor hair.

So, OK. Maybe we’re not unique enough to warrant a headline in the NY Times. But that’s what bloggers are here for. Somebody had to bring it up before the Iowa/NH mind-meld took affect and we all ran like lemmings to get behind the early winning candidate.