Early-voting polling numbers suggest Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be making inroads in turning Georgia blue this November, though local Republicans said the numbers aren’t representative of the state as a whole and certainly won’t prove true for Carroll County.

According to a poll conducted by SurveyUSA, an independent, non-partisan, opinion research firm, Obama holds a six-point advantage over Republican nominee John McCain among the 18 percent of Georgia voters who said they have already cast a ballot. The same poll has McCain up eight points among all registered voters. The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won the state was in 1992 when Bill Clinton edged out George Bush, due in part to the 13 percent of the electorate that voted for Independent Ross Perot.

The most recent poll was conducted for WXIA-TV in Atlanta and WMAZ-TV in Macon. Because the two cities for which the poll was conducted are major metropolitan thoroughfares, area Republicans are quick to point out the numbers may be more representative of urban voting trends than the will of state electorate as a whole.

“We’re in rural Georgia, and really most of the state is rural,” said Carroll County Republican Party Chairman Terry Agne. “People are going to be surprised on election day when a lot of the silent majority that came out for Ronald Reagan are going to be coming out to the polls in large numbers. Here in Carroll County, I bet we vote 75 percent for McCain.”

Agne attributes what he considers to be skewed poll numbers to the fact Republicans as a whole are more hesitant to align themselves along party lines and are therefore more likely to tell pollsters that they are undecided.

Frank McMinn, local Republican party vice-chair, dismissed the poll as an example of how the liberal media is trying to swing the election to the Democrats. Because a majority of ballots have not been cast, McMinn said, it’s unlikely early voting will have much of an impact on the Nov. 4 outcome.

“I think the American people are so mad, this poll stuff doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “Early voting isn’t going to tell you much in the final analysis. We’ve got too many absentee ballots still out. We’ve got too many military votes from overseas still out.”

Polls are rarely completely representative of the electorate, and this poll in particular raises questions about what parts of the state were blanketed and how indicative the numbers are of the race at this point, said University of West Georgia sociology Professor David Jenks.

“I don’t think you can make the inference that Georgia is becoming purple or red or blue or anything else from those polls,” Jenks said. “One of the things we’ve noticed in demographics, you’ll find that places that have large urban centers are going to vote Democratic, so if the poll was given in major cities, it might explain why it favors Democrats.”

Although interpretation of the poll is largely up in the air, the results do suggest the possibility of an ideological shift in what was once an uncontested red state. President George W. Bush carried Georgia in 2004 by 17 points and won in 2000 by 12 points. In addition to tightening statewide polls, Secretary of State Karen Handel’s Web site has early voting numbers broken down by demographics, and of the more than 509,000 Georgians already casting a ballot, 36 percent of those are black men and women. In a state that has a black population of 30 percent, such high minority turnout is a good sign for Obama, said Ken Spitze, secretary of the Carroll County Democratic Party.

“Traditionally, the African-American turnout has been below well below the actual percentage of the population that they represent,” Spitze said. “So any higher voter turnout is great, and it certainly indicates it’s more of a Democratic election.”