Georgia's shifting alliances: moving from a one-party state to two parties isn't easy or pretty. Georgia knows.

• Author: Salzer, James

With just seven days left in his first legislative session, Republican Governor Sonny Perdue walked through the back door of his office and into the glare of TV cameras, welcoming a crowd of reporters attracted by the spectacle of Capitol politics no Georgian alive had ever known.

Perdue's trademark good ol' boy grin crossed his face, then he opened his press conference with a very ungovernor-like greeting: "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the greatest show on earth."

After decades of usually quietly efficient one-party government, Georgia spent the first four months of 2003 learning, for the first time since Reconstruction, what it was like to have a two-party statehouse.

Georgia made the transition with a new set of leaders in the governor's office, the Senate--where Republicans were in power for the first time since at least the 1800s--and the House, where the longest-serving speaker in the country had been booted out by voters.

While the statehouse may have been entertaining to outsiders for most of the 40-day session, lawmakers found it frustrating. The new leaders spent months testing their power, but no one seemed to be in control of the agenda or know whether there was an agenda. "It was like riding a roller coaster at night without lights," says Representative Burke Day.

In the months after the 2002 elections, Georgia went from a statehouse run by conservative Democrats to something more akin to a constantly changing multiparty system, where coalitions were formed over an issue or two, but with no permanent friends and allies. "We don't have a bipartisan state, we have about six factions," says Wayne Garner, a lobbyist who served in the Senate leadership during the early 1990s. "It's hard to muster the votes for anything."

By the time Perdue was comparing the session to a circus, little of his legislative agenda had moved. Members of his own party were criticizing him in public. And the governor's plan to balance a state budget plagued by a $620 million shortfall by raising cigarette taxes had been trounced in the House.

In the Democrat-led House, the state's first new speaker in 30 years was finding himself bogged down in a fractious, inter-party battle over a new state flag. Terry Coleman was getting nowhere trying to convince lawmakers to agree on a way to fund the state's $16 billion budget. Senators, meanwhile, were whizzing bills through their chamber after stripping the Democratic lieutenant governor of his authority even though their legislation was being bottled up in the Democratic House. It all but guaranteed that the thing Republican leaders most wanted--new district lines that would cement their control of the Senate for the rest of the decade--would die with the session.

A BIT OF A SURPRISE

None of this could have been predicted last fall, when Democratic Governor Roy Barnes appeared to be cruising to a second term. No governor running for a second consecutive term in Georgia had ever lost. And Republicans had fumbled chances to win the top prize in Georgia throughout the 1990s. GOP leaders expected to fare no better in legislative elections.

Democrats had run state government since the end of Reconstruction. Up until about a decade ago, only one in five lawmakers was Republican. Old-timers in Perdue's tiny Georgia hometown of Bonaire remember being able to point out the

Republicans at the voting booths as if they were from another country.

The suburban boom in Atlanta, however, and a 1990s redistricting that created solidly white and overwhelming black seats, brought a rise in GOP power, although Republicans remained a minority. In fast growing counties like Gwinnett, northeast of Atlanta, legislative delegations changed from all Democrats to virtually all Republicans in only a few election cycles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Although Barnes raised a record $20 million for his re-election bid, some voters were mad at him for his lightning quick move in 2001 to get lawmakers to approve a new state flag that downplayed the Confederate battle emblem. Teachers also were upset over his crusade to change schools.

Perdue, however, vowed to give voters a choice on the state flag and promised teachers they'd be better treated. He won big in his native rural Georgia and did well enough in the Atlanta suburbs to upset Barnes.

Perdue walked into office facing the worst state fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. Georgia came late to many of the financial problems facing other states, and the new governor had only two months before the 2003 session to figure out how to balance a budget scarred by a year and a half of declining tax revenues and rising education and Medicaid costs. And the Republican governor, it appeared, had to run a state that still had Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

The margin, however, was small in the Senate. So the day after the election, he huddled with Senate Republican leaders and began working to get conservative Democratic senators to switch sides. The governor himself had switched parties in 1998. Promising committee chairmanships and funding for pet local projects, they got four Democrats to switch parties within a week. The Senate now had its...