EVERY Georgia Republican has a story about when he knew this election night was going to be a big one for the GOP For Michelle Hitt, deputy campaign manager for Senate candidate Saxby Chambliss, the moment came just after 8 o’clock. Only about 3 percent of the returns had trickled in. “That’s when the Today show called us to schedule an interview for the morning,” says Hitt. “I knew they were looking at some numbers we didn’t have—really good numbers.” Two-and-a-half hours later, the national media announced the race for Chambliss. “That’s when I knew it was over,” Chambliss himself says. The rest of the country, meanwhile, was getting its first taste of how huge a night the Republicans were going to have.
Nowhere was it huger than in Georgia—and Chambliss’s defeat of Sen. Max Cleland was only a piece of it. Over the last decade or so, every other southern state has seen a watershed election in which Republicans finally broke the Democratic stranglehold on state and local government. Georgia was the last holdout. On November 5, however, Sonny Perdue became Georgia’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction. He made it there by beating incumbent Roy Barnes, who had been considered a potential Democratic vice-presidential nominee for 2004. And the Republicans’ achievements didn’t end there. On November 8, three Democratic state senators announced that they would switch parties, thereby throwing a chamber of the legislature into GOP hands—also for the first time since Reconstruction. At long last, realignment had come to Georgia.
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