Trailing Candidates Fight for Name Recognition

By Odette Yousef

Atlanta, GA – With just over one month until Atlanta's mayoral election, the candidates who are weakest in the polls are still soldiering on. Many are optimistic that they can still do what the frontrunners did long ago: introduce themselves to the city's voters.

WABE's Odette Yousef reports.

All the candidates were in the same room Wednesday morning, at a networking breakfast hosted by Central Atlanta Progress. The downtown civic booster group invited area business people, residents, and visitors to meet them.

For trailing candidates, like Kyle Keyser, this was a chance to answer voters' big questions, which the frontrunners have addressed in the many debates that he was not invited to join.

KEYSER: It would be nice if Atlanta did have a new relationship with the state.
VOTER: How do you reinvent that relationship?
KEYSER: Well I think... it's a good question. I think you need to reach out to the people... I don't know...

Atlanta attorney and Grant park resident David Dreyer was the one grilling Keyser. Dreyer feels like the candidates have been accessible to the public, but it's harder to hear what the underdogs, like Kyle, are trying to say:

DREYER: I get the sense that he wants to be that community voice, whether it's at a debate or at an event like this, so that the other candidates have to address those issues more seriously.

Candidate Peter Brownlowe, who resigned from the Atlanta Police Department to run, said he's eager to talk about his platform. But many voters still don't even know who he is:

BROWNLOWE: The main drawbacks with these elections is that if you don't have enough funds to put yourself out there, it's really hard to actually get people to know who you are and get the support that you need.

Brownlowe slipped out quietly a short while later, while the event was still in full swing just as one frontrunner, Kasim Reed, arrived.

Brownlowe, like Keyser, hasn't been invited to many of the forums. Neither has Tiffany Brown, who's running as a write-in.

BROWN: There has been some problems with me being invited and then uninvited to certain things because of being a write-in candidate, there's a bit of problems with that. But I'm trying to open the door for write-in candidates to be seen as regular candidates, so we're working on that

The true viability of the candidates may become clearer this week. Today is the latest deadline for campaign finance disclosure forms.

Odette Yousef, WABE News.