What A Day - 1: Georgia: The New Bellwether

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

Georgia has become one of the most closely watched states in America, but its story didn't begin with the last election.Jen, Mitch, and Errin explore the history, communities, and political forces that transformed Georgia into the center of the national conversation.Through interviews with civic leaders, elected officials, and everyday Georgians, they examine how the state's civil rights legacy, rapid growth, and changing electorate continue to shape both Southern politics and the future of the country.Guests: Sen. Jon Ossoff, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, LaTosha Brown (Black Voters Matter), Kyle Tibbs-Jones (The Bitter Southerner)

Hey, what a day listeners. Jane here. Dropping in to share the first episode of a new Crooked Limited Series we're really excited about. It's called Long Play. The South is the new epicenter of American politics. It's the fastest growing region in the country, and its power in Congress and the Electoral College is growing too. And now, changes to the Voting Rights Act have raised the stakes even higher. For both major parties, the path to winning America runs through the South, but to win it, you have to understand it. Long Play is a limited series from the folks who brought you Showtimes The Circus.

Across six southern states, Long Play examines the issues driving voters in a region that could shape the future of our politics and our country. It's really excellent work from Emmy-nominated host in Southerner, Jennifer Palmieri, former mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrow, and award-winning journalist Aaron Haynes. We're thrilled to share it with you, and I can't wait for you to hear such a fascinating examination of what the New South really is. You can listen to the first episode right here, and if you like it, watch or listen to the second episode right now by subscribing to Long Play Series on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll put the links in the show notes. I think Georgia's the premier battleground state of the nation. What do you think about politics in Georgia or not? I feel like it should be a big change, you know. We've been fighting for here in Georgia is the fundamentals of the good life.

I think it's getting better. It's just going to take everybody coming together. Yeah, it could be better, honestly. People are talking plainly about the shift. There's something happening. These people are my people. People that voted for Donald Trump in 2024 are so angry. They're like, I'll never vote Republican again.

We have to reframe the conversation. This isn't about participation. This is about power. Welcome to Georgia, the new Bellwether State. In 2020, it be a very. became an unlikely tipping point, going blue for the first time in nearly three decades, only to flip back to red in 2024. Since then, Georgia has been the center of some of the biggest political fights in America.

Donald Trump's election fraud claims, the battle over voting rights, and the first big cracks in the MAGA coalition. What happens in a state like Georgia rarely stays in Georgia. So what does it tell us about what's coming next? I'm Jennifer Palmary. I'm a former White House communications director and political advisor. More relevant to this show, I am proud to have been born in Mississippi and spent my formative years in the South. This summer, I'm teaming up with former Louisiana lieutenant governor and New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu,

and Aaron Haynes, editor-at-large of the 19th and MS Now contributor. We're traveling across six southern states to explore the people, the issues, and what the rest of us are missing about a region, that will increasingly shape our politics and our country. This is Longplay, winning the South. Episode 1, Georgia. Welcome to Grocery on Home. I love that. This is awesome. Isn't it awesome?

I mean, it's like right in the middle of the neighborhood. It's like a speakeasy book for music. We call the show Longplay, because we're getting out from the day to day to look at the long game. But also because we love music. We love music. The South is the new political epicenter of the country. I mean, it's just like, if you cannot win in the South, you are not going to be able to win America. In Georgia, population's changing, demographics are changing.

All others. Just six years ago, it was roughly three quarters of white. Today, it's majority-minority state, and the state is 30% black presidents. Yes. You can see the South changing in front of people's eyes. Georgia is the new bellwether. It's going to be the center of the political universe headed into the midterms. We know that the eyes of the nation are going to be on Georgia.

The thing you can't do is ignoring. this region, which is what... We've got to be on the field. Our first stop was Atlanta, the focal point of Trump's 20-20 voter fraud claims. Mitch went to talk to someone who knows a thing or two about Georgia politics and battle lines, Greg Bluestain, chief political reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. So the state was blue, then all of a sudden it went really, really red. Then all of a sudden, it starts trending back.

Yeah, I mean, no one would have thought maybe 15, 20 years ago that Georgia would be in this space right now where it's so closely divided. The president seems just to be fixated on the 2020 election. Can you talk a little bit about what you think is pushing at and why in Fulton County? I mean, one reason why Fulton County is the bluest bastion in Georgia. Democrats can't win without huge turnout in Fulton County. But these complaints, these concerns have been vetted and looked at and debunked in many ways over and over again. But on the Republican side of the line, there's still a deep division.

There's many others, very magout line, who parrot the president's lines about election fraud in Georgia. You've got Mike Collins. He's the Senate nominee who not so long ago told CNN that Trump won the 2020 election. So it's still animating a lot of the debates we're having about elections here in Georgia. Right. On the ballot in a couple of months, John Ossoff is up for re-election. When I first talked to John Ossoff in early 2017, There was a special election for a deep red seat, but it was trending blue. He called me up, and he said, hey, can you add me the list of people running?

I want you to pay attention to my campaign. I said, okay, join the club. Was that really your response? And did you say whatever? I mean, I was just kind of like, look, there's 16 people, you know, good luck guy. But then he said, I have John Lewis's endorsement. What's so interesting about this is in 2020, the southern state of Georgia elected two Democrats. And that doesn't happen by accident.

Yeah. There was a long, long history in Georgia where when Democrats ran for higher office, clinging to very GOP-friendly values. And that started really changing in a big way. In 2018, when Stacey Abrams ran for governor, she and other allies talked more about mobilizing people who ignore mid-term elections

and getting them out to vote, sending people out in the communities. And now when it comes to where the state is, it could be called a purple state, peri-winkle state, a fuchsia state, you name it, but we're definitely not a red or blue state by any means. So Savannah, let's give them a united Georgia. The way down at Mar-a-Lago, that Georgia... That's Georgia Senator John Ossoff at a rally in Savannah.

He's running to hold his seat this fall after a surprise win in 2020 that reshaped the political map. Clips like this from his rallies have been going viral on social media, fueling speculation about his future, and even a presidential run. I sat down with him to see what's driving all that attention and how he sees this moment and his place in it. You were a son of Atlanta, really inspired by John Lewis, worked for him, he endorsed you. Do you think about the responsibility that comes

with being a leader in Georgia's next chapter? When I first worked for Congressman John Lewis as a very young man, What he wanted me to understand was the historic alliance between blacks and Jews in the American South during the civil rights movement. And it's something that I think echoes through the story of a young Jewish man and a black pastor from Ebenezer Baptist Church running together for the U.S. Senate. So we now know your opponent, Congressman Mike Collins. He is a Trump-endorsed MAGA candidate. This is somebody who voted against releasing the Epstein files until President Trump told the House Republicans was okay to do so. This is somebody who is currently under a congressional ethics investigation.

And then there's just a lot of troubling stuff online from him. What would it mean for Georgia to be represented by him, the United States Senate? This is a disastrous nominee for the GOP. It's just not who we are in the state of Georgia. And still, you can't expect that it's going to be anything but close here. This will be the closest Senate race in the country. We have to build the most massive grassroots get out the vote effort in Georgia history because we also expect some of the most determined attacks on voting rights in modern American history, right?

Fulton County, Georgia, where the president of the United States sent Director of National Intelligence to oversee a ballot raid here in Georgia. That's something that I think people are really worried about when people. they see what's happening with Fulton County. It should worry people. But I think the thing that they don't understand in the White House is that because of our civil rights history in the South, their attacks on voting rights, they don't deter or intimidate people from voting.

They galvanize a defiant determination to vote. I was here on January 5th, 2021. The night that you won, Senator Warnock won. People had to vote in a primary. They had to vote in the general election. for Joe Biden, for you, for Senator Warnock, and then they had to vote six weeks later in this runoff. And they did in record numbers.

People forget. The next morning was January 6th. What was that whiplash moment like for you? That attack on the Capitol was an attack on voting rights. It was an effort to throw out Georgia voters' ballots and impose a defeated president through violence. Since then, Robie Wade. The voting rights decision, all of the nonsense in Fulton County, do you worry a lot of voters are going to feel unmotivated or beaten down?

I think our coalition is just growing, but it's a very competitive battleground state, and the Republican Party is poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. And we can take nothing for granted. It's a basketball team. Southern ice brutality. I like the diversity of people. Y'all got a football team? Go on. Most people are friendly here, and I love that about Georgia.

Whether Asoff can win again here remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure. Georgia no longer fits neatly into anyone's political boxes. And if you are relying on an old picture of who's a Georgia voter or what the South looks like, you might be missing what's happening here now. Which brought Aaron and I to Athens, Georgia. To meet with Kyle Tives Jones, co-founder and editor of the award-winning Bitter Southerner, a magazine founded by liberal Southerners who were looking to create a home.

Welcome to God's Living Room, aka a good southern Florida. Cheers, welcome. Cheers. Okay, so tell us about founding the Bitter Southerner. So in 2013, we started online. We were telling stories, one story a week online. People are like, wait a minute, we haven't heard a voice like this in the South. Yes.

We haven't heard liberal southerners who say y'all writing about serious issues and topics. Oh, speaking of better and good. We've got some peach preserves. Peter, these pieces look legit. And you say you describe yourself as a liberal southerner. So that's like not the stereotype here. Why do you do it? Well, and before you answer, I would say liberal white southern.

That is the thing that is not typical, right? Because Democrat in the South, you're usually not thinking about somebody who looks like you. And yet you are. That's right. You know, that's an old way of looking at the South. The South and the rest of the nation, there's a duality to the South. There's a duality to the nation. But what's so interesting?

People ask me all the time about being outspoken. Yeah. Like, Colin, you're so outspoken. any woman living anywhere across the South, if you are racking your brain for a way to use your voice, to tell your truth,

if you want to do that, but you're a little nervous, I would just say, take baby steps. And I took baby steps and then bigger steps, and I walked, and then I ran. There's a lot of progressive

to liberal white women in the South. When Democrats went in Georgia, that's part of the recipe of why. Well, black women lead the way. Absolutely. 100%. But yes, women. There's an old fundamental tension in Georgia.

Is it the voters who get to pick their elected officials or the elected officials who get to pick their voters? Who gets to participate in this democracy? That's a question Aaron Haynes wanted answers to. That is playing out right here in Fulton County. It's home to the most black voters. in the state. You've seen voter suppression and expansion of voter participation

playing out here in Georgia. People like Stacey Abrams or Latasha Brown, who starts Black Voters Matter 10 years ago. My people have always taught this nation how to sing its freedom songs because we know what it feels to be a cage bird, but we also know what it feels to lift every voice. She's advocating for voting rights. She's helping get black people elected.

people elected, but more importantly mobilizing black voters. I think about your journey around voting. I mean, this has been a lifelong journey from you. Aaron met up with Atasha Brown at a park near the home where Martin Luther King Jr. was born to talk about why she does this work. As a child, I would like when elections would come around because it was almost kind of a ritual. My grandmother, when she went in a voting booth, there was like, nobody but her and her baby.

And so she would actually let me pull. There was like a lever. She would let me pull the lever. And just that act alone, let me know how special voting was. Yeah. How does that shift to you caring, not about just your own vote, but voting rights for others? My orientation didn't start as voting was going to help me as an individual get better. I thought that voting would help get resources to my community and which I am a part of.

In some ways, some of that has been lost. We've reduced voting to kind of this individual act of power. This idea that I'm not going to vote because I don't like the candidate. That is so foreign. That was so foreign to me. I never had the luxury of that. My people were the salt of the earth. They were the strength behind the movement.

January 5th, 2021, the runoff election. 2020. I want people to remember. Like, in 2020, the world has shut down. Yeah. We're in a global pandemic. And we got an election. A consequential election.

A consequential election. And so what we did is we had a collard green caucus. We set up tents where people could early vote and they had their collard greens, their cornbread, and their black eyepie. In the midst of all of those circumstances that were going on. You had to get creative.

We had to get creative. To break through. Here we are in 2026. The Louisiana versus Calais decision comes down from the Supreme Court, taking away the voting rights act. Talk to me about your reaction to that decision. My 92-year-old, we were actually at the salon,

getting her nails done. I looked at the phone, and I saw the alert. And I'm like, I looked at my, And I was like, they killed the Voter Rights Act, and she started crying. What did you decide to do in that moment? I was like, no, let's get ready. Let's go. Georgia was one of the states attempting to redraw the maps here. They call a special session.

Our response was to camp out at the Capitol. They were not going to do this on our watch. I think they understood that this was going to be a fight. The people organized themselves. And as a result, the same day, the session would call, they actually called it off. We cannot allow people to amass power at the expense of us not showing up for us.

We're going to do it with joy. We're going to do it with integrity, but we're going to do in the fullness of our power. It feels different setting out here today. What about you? It does. It represents, in some ways, past, the present, but also the future.

I did not believe that we would ever be here again. Yeah. But just like this house is still standing, we are still standing. Are you going to vote this year in the Senate race? I wrote every year in every race. It's very important to me to vote. You're going to vote for the first time? Absolutely, yes.

It's just dear to me. If we don't speak, we won't be able to change. One of the issues you care about. Universal incomes, universal health care. I really care about the data centers. Gas prices are high. Property taxes are kind of high. Higher taxes on billionaires.

Like, I want to be. to get them to help with the climate crisis. Immigration and foreign policy decisions. School system. Education. Education is key. I'm very much into my Second Amendment right. I think they can ban guns.

If you don't vote, then you have no right to complain. Someone's trying to stop you from voting. That should be your motivation to really want to vote. One of the most interesting things about Georgia is that Republicans in this state have been willing to stand up to President Trump in a way that you do not see in other places. Even if that means rebutting him. for budding him publicly. There was Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who both pushed back on Trump's voter fraud claims.

And then there's someone else. One of Trump's biggest supporters, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who had a very public split with him just this year. What message does that send to Republicans around the country who may be starting to say, I'm not sure I see my place in MAGA anymore? I sat down with MTG to get a closer look.

We are setting ready, guys. All right. Okay. Congressman, thank you so much for doing this. Glad to do it. So you grew up here, tell me, was your family Republicans? Were you apolitical? I grew up in a family construction business where my parents discussed all the issues at the kitchen table.

And then when did you start getting interested in politics? Or was there a point where you're like, wow, America's really just not working anymore? It was a lot of America's not working anymore, but it was raising my own children, running our construction. company and then feeling the same impact that my parents talked about when I was growing up. And so I had this very naive perspective. I'll just run for Congress and go up there and make changes. And you felt President Trump at this time, though, you were hanging in there with him, we were starting to have doubts. I was a sucker for all the lines at the rallies. I was all for Make America Great Again. Things started changing by the summer of 2025. When it came time

For me to do my job representing my district, I was budding heads with the president that I helped get elected. He was supposed to drain the swamp. Right. Now he's become king of the swamp. Do you feel like there's other Republicans in Georgia that feel like you? Oh, yeah. There is a huge pullback. People that came out and voted for Donald Trump, they feel betrayed.

And at the same time, though, here's the problem. The Democrats, they never change their policies that they lost on. And so disaffected MAGA or MAHA Republican voters from 2024 don't have a party to turn to. The two most high-profile Republicans in the state are you and Governor Kemp. You all both bucked President Trump, but you both remained popular in the state. That does not happen in other states. Like have you thought about that? It didn't, you know... I've thought a lot about it, but it makes sense to me because I've lived here my whole life.

What is it about Georgia? So if you're in Georgia and if you were to make some sort of statement that people didn't really agree with, you'll be met with like a silence and people just might just, hmm, and they might turn their head. And that's kind of how Trump hit Georgia. If you look at Georgia's history, we are very used to conflict. We've been a Democrat state and we've been a Republican state. The cradle of the Confederacy? Yes.

Or it's placed in civil rights movement. Yes. And it's also one of the things in Georgia that we're most proud of. We love to find something across the aisle that we can relate to with our neighbor. That's something Donald Trump could never understand his entire life. Trump is obsessed with Georgia. Are other Republicans fired up about 2020 still? I think what matters to people in the midterms is inflation.

Yeah. Gas prices. Another foreign war. Most Americans I talk to, Democrats and Republicans, they're like, I hate both parties. Both parties have failed us. Why vote for any of them? Well, because you have to vote for somebody. So newly, you don't have to vote for anybody.

I don't buy into the lesser evil, vote for the lesser evil kind of thing. I go into a restaurant and there's nothing good on the menu. I don't want to pick the least of the bad. I don't want to eat there at all. The future of politics is probably going to get really just very bad. before it gets better. My big takeaway after talking to people here for a week is how Georgia is different from any other southern state. It is with attention that Atlanta was built the way it was,

that there was a decision made, that it was going to be the city too busy to hate, that there was a decision made to put an infrastructure around the airport so that there was a black middle class that could flourish here. That continues to matter today. today, but it's not enough. New groups have had to be formed groups like Black Voters Matter, the kind of campaigns that Senator Ossoff, Senator Warnock ran that try to bring new voters in. It is a dynamic and vibrant place, but when people move with intention to make change, they can do it.

Everybody is starting to say, we can't keep going the way we're going. I love my country. It could be in a little better shape. Georgia is a different place. American democracy has been shaped by this part of the country from the very beginning. What's in Georgia now is not going to stay in Georgia. It's going to permeate all across the southern states, and it's going to lead the rest of the country and trying to figure out how we go forward.

No matter what shape it's in, I love my country. But wherever you are. From left, right and crooked media, watch Longplay on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at Longplay series or listen wherever you get your podcast. Episode 2, Texas is out right now. Hey, did you hear? Watermelon is back at booster juice all summer long. Nice.

I love the watermelon explosion. And the watermelon wave. Yep. They even got a new watermelon assaye pool this year. The one in a melon bowl. And what does that sound like? Mmm. Like that.

Booster Juice. Canadian born. Blending since 1999. I don't know.