The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Fight to Turn Georgia Blue

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

This month, Georgia flipped: its voters picked a Democrat for President for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first-term election. To a significant degree, Charles Bethea says, this was owing to political organizing among Black voters; after all, Donald Trump still received approximately seventy per cent of the white vote. Bethea tells David Remnick about the political evolution of the state, and he speaks with two Democratic organizers: Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project, and Royce Reeves, Sr., a city commissioner in Cordele, Georgia. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Nobody was quite expecting the state of Georgia to become a crucible of politics in America. But a major organizing effort by Democrats gave Georgia to Biden, the first time for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. Now both of Georgia's Senate seats are up for grabs in runoff race. in January. The stakes could not be higher. These two seats will determine the balance of power in the Senate, and that, of course, will be critical to what the Biden administration can and cannot achieve. It's a new adventure here every day in Georgia. Did you think that Georgia become the center of the

political universe? Um, I mean, no, not really. Staff writer Charles Bethay is based in Atlanta, and he's been reporting on all of this for many months. A lot of people, Biden and Trump supporters alike, spent the days after election day sweating out the results in Georgia, Charles. And I've got to say that at least on Twitter, you were calling it for Biden really early. Where did that confidence in Biden terms come from? Well, I mean, you know, before the election, I felt like demographic shifts and voter registration drives and concern about Trump's handling of the pandemic was going to benefit Biden quite a bit. But, you know, on the day of the election and the days following, I knew certain counties, especially a few north of Atlanta, Cobb County, Gwinnett County, DeKalb County,

that these Democrat-leaning counties were going to potentially be late reporting their returns. And also on election day, there was a pipe that burst in Fulton County, which is a very Democrat-leaning County, that delayed things there. So I was pretty confident that while Trump got out to a lead, Biden was going to make up most of that as returns came in. So Joe Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate to win in Georgia for nearly 30 years. And yet as recently as the 2018 midterms, we saw just how hard it is for a Democrat to get elected there statewide. Stacey Abrams lost the governor's race by 50,000 votes, and they were accusations of voter suppression, what just changed to give the state to Biden?

Well, first of all, the 50,000 or so vote margin that separated Stacey Abrams from Brian Kemp, who became governor, is about how much Democrats have been gaining on Republicans every two years or so over the last decade. So there was an expectation there that that alone would lead to a very close election. Also, you know, there have been lots of efforts to register voters, some of them led by Stacey Abrams and a group she founded called the New Georgia Project. And I actually spoke with Ence Uffat, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, about these efforts. I mean, many people have written and talked about the changing demographics in Georgia. Georgia is going to be the first state in the deep south with a white minority.

So up to this point, we've registered half a million. people to vote. Most of them, people of color. And we saw that Biden won Georgia with 29% of the white vote. Biden got 29% of the white vote in our state. And so, like, yay, I suppose. But Republicans, white conservatives in Georgia have purged people from the voter rolls, right? subjected black voters to intimidation.

Black voters and Latino voters are the number one targets of misinformation and disinformation campaigns. And we're in the middle of a pandemic. And cops keep shooting black people and with no accountability. And they still showed up and voted for Biden. So when we talk about what it took to get here in Georgia, it is very on brand to center white suburban women. But that is only a part of the story.

Because, again, Trump won 71% of white voters in Georgia, and Biden still pulled it up. We're talking about the election in Georgia, and we'll continue in a moment. So you've got two Senate races that are heading toward runoff elections. And these are going to be hugely consequential for the whole nation, for the whole balance of power in this country. So just to get some facts straight here, states don't usually elect both of their senators at once, do they? Why is that happening now? Right. So one of them is David Purdue's seat is up for re-election, and that's normal. But the other is a result of Republican Senator Johnny Isaacson retiring due to illness and his seat being briefly filled by Kelly Leffler by appointment by Governor Kemp. And there was a special election that fielded something like 20 candidates, and the result of that was Leffler ending up in a runoff with Raphael Warnock, the Democrat.

How do you expect the dynamics of the Senate races to be different in any way from the presidential race between Trump and Biden? I mean, conventional wisdom and histories show that runoffs don't really draw a lot of voters, and those that they draw, tend to be hyper-periodens. partisan and highly motivated. But in this case, control of the sentence at play, as we said, there's a huge amount of interest outside of Georgia. There's a lot of money coming in. There's Andrew Yang has moved here or is moving here. We've already seen Rubio and Rick Scott come here to stump. When I talked to NSEU fought from the New Georgia Project, she also brought up the unique racial and age dynamics of the runoffs that could potentially help Democrats more than Republicans. 80-year-old Biden up against 80-year-old Trump doesn't feel like the same

sort of research scenario for Raphael Warnock versus Kelly Loughler for a number of reasons, race, gender, name recognition. I think that there's a sort of authoritarian draw, the strongman draw that people are attracted to that we just don't. see with Kelly Loeffler and Warnock's also a black man, right? Thinking about Warnock as only the third person to ever command Dr. King's pulpit since he was murdered. That means something, that means something not only in Atlanta, but it means something in black pockets all across the state. Thinking about Warnock and Asov as they've run together, they've messaged together,

they've done ads together, they came out with Barack Obama together. President-elect Biden, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's exciting to see what is possible. I think that if anything, their audiences, their bases, if you will, will bleed over to one another, that the white suburban moms of Atlanta, who ride for John Ossoff will get introduced to Warnock, you know, this black pastor from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. And so Warnock campaigning with Asov

but absolutely lends credibility to Asov that he could not buy. Uffat mentioned Democratic pockets outside of Atlanta. Now, on the map of the presidential election, Georgia looks like a lot of other states with deep blue cities and a whole lot of red elsewhere. Are the small towns and rural areas actually in play for Democrats? I mean, outside of Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah? Well, to be sure, the greater Atlanta area is where the Democrat base lives, but rural Georgia's not just white, it's not just Republican, even if it leans that way.

There are a lot of rural black communities. I actually drove down to visit one of those communities a few hours south of Atlanta recently to meet with a guy named Royce Reeves, who's a city commissioner in a town called Cordial. And, you know, there's a watermelon capital in the world, of course. supposedly produce and ship out more watermelons than any other place in the world. And I don't, you know, I rarely eat the watermelon. We ate so many of them coming up. You know, it's like... So Cordial's a small town.

There's something like 12,000 people there. But even here in rural Georgia, Reeves has seen the demographic shift. The railroad trives used to separate the races. The African Americans are on the west side of... tracks and white America is on the on the east side of town but like I say you know people people have done better so they did better and you know because they did better they was able to afford homes and I expect in the next 10 15 years you know there will be no what was what was affectioned known as the white side and the black side those days are those days vanishing and vanishing

fast we have a majority of African-American population, like 65, 70 percent. First time as a three years ago, we had our first majority of African-American board with the election of the first African-American chair here in courtier, Georgia. So like a possibly surprising number of black men, Reeves did support Trump in 2016, but he did also quickly grow disillusioned with him. He lost it with me with the way he handled the Cunrich-Melieu's situation. Just totally embarrassing.

He was just like, you know, it was like in your face, you know, I don't give a damn about you. And it's, you know, we can't, you know, moving forward, you know, we came so far. You were attracted to him in 2000. So I met, I met Royce in 2018 after his disillusionment had really taken hold. He was getting out the vote at the time for Stacey Abrams. Abrams, and he was doing it in kind of a dramatic way, as is his sort of way of doing most things. He'd borrowed a funeral limo, and he was driving around town, and he was basically yelling out the window

at folks that he saw. I mean, and he was trying to get him to go vote, and he was really good at speaking their language. I think he has kind of a gift at that. Being in this community all of my life, being a barber, being in the business. I've been in, you know, you got to know how to talk to people, you got to know who you're talking to. You can't just show up because it's vote time and asking somebody to vote for someone that you feel like we're going to do us good. I mean, because the senses of most people is, you know, I don't give a fuck.

You know, I don't, you know, fuck Biden and Trump. You know, you get that sometimes. So, you know, it's difficult at time. But like I said, for the most of it here, after years are doing it, you know, when they see you coming up and they know it's an election, they're like, oh, I already know. already know I'm getting in. I'm getting in. And so that's, that was just one of the thing. We're blessed with that here.

And so I want to talk about what you're thinking about the upcoming Senate runoffs. I've been talking to people, political scientists and experts on elections and runoffs, who say that it's very hard to get people to come out and runoffs, especially around the holidays. So what do you... But Donald Trump, you have to look at these things from a different side. With Donald Trump, I refuse to acknowledge that Biden and Harris has won. and people are still interested. They're still watching.

Well, you're correct. Normally, people wouldn't come back out to vote. I just don't see that happening this time. The people that came out to vote in the presidential election, they're coming back to vote here in Georgia for those two seats. And how are you going to be involved in helping them make sure they come back? What are you planning to do this time? I'm going to be involved.

Social media. I'll be sending out letters to churches, motorcycle clubs, different. I have my mask on with my lasso, and I'll be pulling up. I'll be pulling up in my truck, you know, asking people that they need a ride. We'll have a box of mask, some hand sanitizer, and we're going to do what we can do to get people to the polls as we've always done. Charles, all of this gets down to the question of the future in the state of Georgia. Has Georgia flipped over to the blue side? What's your read on that? I mean, we have to remember that Biden, at the end of the day, won Georgia by 13 or 14,000 votes. Trump won by comparison, Georgia in 2016, by a few

hundred thousand votes. So, you know, if Biden had done that, sure, we could, I think, reasonably say that Georgia's blue. But given how tight it was and given that David Perdue actually was something like 90 or 100,000 votes ahead of Ossoff before their runoff, it's a battleground state. And if we have to assign a color to it, it should be like a lavender or a periwinkle or something. The key for each side moving into future elections is going to continue to more and more be about getting out the vote. And so that's where somebody like Enseu fought and the New Georgia Project is going to really continue to play a critical role. Elections are determined. Election results outcomes are determined by who shows up and whose votes get counted.

And for a very long time, there was a lack of investment. in turning out black voters, and there is a long and recent history of voter suppression. And so the work of the New Georgia Project, the work of Leader Abrams, the work of Fair Fight, and a lot of people who are in our ecosystem have helped address those two issues, one who shows up and two, whose votes get counted. That's going to play out over and over and over again until we, until Georgia gets an identity. NSEUFAT is the CEO of the New Georgia Project.

We also heard from Royce Reeve Senior, a city commissioner in Cordial. Charles Bethay is a staff writer. Charles, thanks so much for all your reporting during this long election season. No problem. Thanks, David. You can read Charles' article on the Senate runoff election at New Yorker.com.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tuneyards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calaliyya, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester, Gauphin and Putuguella, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.