It’s not third party voters who will decide whether Georgia’s US Senate race goes into overtime.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s writers opine that third party voters may send Georgia’s Senate race into overtime.

McCoy and others considering casting a ballot for a third-party candidate could shake up Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s battle for a third term. With polls showing Democrat Jim Barksdale in striking distance, both campaigns are quietly bracing for a possible Jan. 10 runoff.

And Libertarian Allen Buckley is hoping voter disgust with both Clinton and Republican Donald Trump — each has made an unfavorable impression with 58 percent of Georgia voters — buoys a campaign that barely surpassed 3 percent in 2008 when he last ran for a Senate seat.

There’s good reason for their concentration on the 2008 race, where Libertarian Allen Buckley appears to have played a spoiler role and sent the General Election into a runoff by denying incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss the requisite 50% plus one vote for outright victory.

But a closer look at the 2008 election shows that the true spoiler wasn’t Buckley, but Republican voters themselves.

In 2008, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R) was sent into a runoff election when he fell 9133 votes short of winning the required 50% plus one.

But where he lost those votes wasn’t third party voters going to Buckley, then, as now, the Libertarian candidate. What denied Chambliss an outright victory was the 181,662 voters who pulled the lever for John McCain, but did not vote for Saxby Chambliss. Most of those just left the ballot slot blank.

In fact, 172,001 voters cast ballots in the 2008 Presidential Election without bothering to vote in the very next election down the ballot. Saxby Chambliss shed even more than that, while Democrat Jim Martin stanched his losses, shedding only 86,730 Obama voters and Allen Buckley took nearly 100,000 votes over the Libertarian Presidential candidate, former Republican Congressman Bob Barr.

Winning just over 5% of those voters who were already in the ballot box and voting for a Republican at the top of the ticket would have put Chambliss over the top in November 2008.

I’ll also point out that a General Election Runoff this year will be vastly different than 2008. We will have nine weeks instead of three, as the Runoff for Federal Elections is scheduled for January 10, 2017. That means a marathon instead of a sprint, including Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hannukah, and New Years Eve. The worst case scenario is a Senate majority hanging in the balance and an incoming President looking for a big win before taking office.

I’m not in the business of giving unsolicited advice, and I would never second-guess the able strategists working for Senator Isakson, but if I were them, I’d make sure to shore up those voters who are going to be in the poll voting for Donald Trump.

A shorter version of this analysis appeared earlier as part of my GaPundit.com morning news email.