On the menu today: For much of 2021, every major Democrat, including President Biden, denounced the state of Georgia as a racist disgrace when its Republican-controlled state government enacted an election-reform law that they insisted was was a voter-suppression effort and “Jim Crow 2.0.” But 2022 brought record turnout in both the primaries and midterm elections, and the state’s African Americans reported great satisfaction with and trust in their voting experience. Now, Joe Biden wants Georgia to vote early in the presidential-primary process, and just about every major southern Democrat wants Atlanta to host the party’s next national convention. Somehow, in a very short period of time, Georgia went from too racist to host the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star game to deserving to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
Democrats: Eh, Maybe Georgia’s Electorate Isn’t So Racist after All
In the minds of Democrats, the state of Georgia is either an oppressive racist hellhole or the bright shining future of American politics, depending on the results of the latest election.
Apparently, Georgia is now good again, because NBC News reports that a lot of elected Democrats from Virginia to Louisiana are urging their party to hold the 2024 national convention in Atlanta:
Southern Democrats are banding together to urge President Joe Biden to select Atlanta for the 2024 Democratic National Convention, according to a letter obtained by NBC News, arguing the choice would solidify the party’s gains in Georgia and demonstrate commitment to the entire region.
Atlanta is one of the three finalists to host the convention, along with New York City and Chicago. Houston was also in the running until recently; its mayor has now joined Atlanta’s bid, adding his name to the letter.
The letter, sent Monday to Biden and Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, is signed by more than 65 current and former Democratic senators, congressmen, governors, mayors and legislators from a dozen Southern states.
Notable names include Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, along with top Biden allies like South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn and former Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond, who is now a top DNC official and Biden political adviser.
The letter from those Democrats specifically cites the central role of African Americans in the city’s life as why it should be chosen over New York or Chicago: “As the cultural and economic hub of Black America, the city embodies the American Dream in the 21st Century. A nominating convention in the city of Atlanta will provide Joe Biden with a backdrop that reflects his personal values and embodies his vision for America.”
When President Biden visited Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Georgia’s senators and other top local party figures bought a full-page ad in the Atlanta Journal Constitution with a simple message in giant letters: “PRESIDENT BIDEN CEMENT YOUR LEGACY CHOOSE ATLANTA.”
Recall that President Biden wants to make Georgia the fourth state to vote in the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries, behind South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and ahead of Iowa.
You can be forgiven for having some whiplash, because in 2021, President Biden called a sweeping elections bill signed into law in Georgia “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an atrocity.” Biden also said, “I am convinced that we’ll be able to stop this because it is the most pernicious thing. This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle. I mean, this is gigantic what they’re trying to do, and it cannot be sustained.” This law was allegedly such a terrible, racist abomination that Major League Baseball determined that the All-Star game could not be played in Atlanta, costing the state an estimated $100 million in tourism revenue.
Just about a year ago, Biden traveled to Atlanta and thundered:
Republicans in Georgia choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem, so they’re putting up obstacles. . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
But a funny thing happened on the way to Election Day. In 2022, under laws that Democrats contended were designed to suppress African-American voters, Georgia had record turnout for the primary and record turnout for a midterm election.
A University of Georgia survey found that zero percent of black respondents said their voting experience in Georgia was poor in the 2022 midterm election. Around 73 percent of black and white voters alike said their voting experience was excellent. In fact, as our Dominic Pino noticed, the survey indicated that black voters had more faith in the counting of the votes than white voters did: “On election confidence, 94.3 percent of black Georgia voters said they were confident their vote was counted as they intended, and 79.7 percent said they were confident the state counted all votes as intended. For white voters, it was 88 percent and 74.8 percent, respectively.”
Our Nate Hochman concluded that, “We have now accumulated a mind-bogglingly large body of evidence not only that Georgia is not a voter-suppression regime, but that it’s actually one of the best-run states in the country when it comes to elections.”
But certain Democrats didn’t just complain about the state’s election laws; some contended that the real problem was Georgia’s electorate. As Stacey Abrams was losing her second bid for governor, several Democrats were quick to point the finger at racism and sexism, even though Senator Raphael Warnock has won four statewide races in two years — if you count the general elections and runoff elections separately.
From the New York Times in September:
Some of Ms. Abrams’s supporters say her struggles are more rooted in sexism than any strategic misstep. She is running in the Deep South for an office that has long been elusive to women and candidates of color. If she wins in November, she will be the first Black woman and only the fifth Black person in American history to occupy a governor’s mansion.
“The picture of leadership we have, Stacey is like the opposite,” said Steve Phillips, an early Abrams supporter and prominent progressive Democratic donor who attributed her polling deficiencies to “just sexism.” Ms. Abrams’s identity as a Black woman is “part of the depth of the enthusiasm for her but it also explains the depth of the resistance.”
Shortly before the election, Abrams herself lamented that her support was lower than she hoped because black men were being targeted by misinformation, painting a not-particularly flattering portrait of that demographic.
Then, after the election, some of those same progressives were eager to lament that the state was just too biased to elect Abrams:
Running in a state that has never elected a Black chief executive, no less a Black woman, Ms. Abrams was also contending with deep prejudices. Ms. Abrams’s supporters saw racism and sexism at play. Other politicians would have received less scrutiny and more leeway, they argue.
“If we believe the electorate has bias in it, then do you blame the person who’s the victim of that bias for not doing something different or better?” said Steve Phillips, an early Abrams supporter and progressive Democratic donor from San Francisco.
By the way, when Biden pushed for the revised schedule prioritizing Georgia, he did so specifically citing the need to prioritize “voters of color.” Biden wrote to the DNC:
We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window. As I said in February 2020, you cannot be the Democratic nominee and win a general election unless you have overwhelming support from voters of color.
So which is it? Is Georgia the state of Jim Crow 2.0, where the electorate was allegedly too racist and sexist and was too easily swayed by “misinformation” to elect Stacey Abrams? Or is it true that, as the southern Democrats contend in their letter, “Everything we have accomplished as a party since January of 2021 can be traced back to Georgia, and specifically, to the metro Atlanta area which swung the state in our favor”?
How could it be that Georgia was too racist to host the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star game but is not too racist to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention?
Some of this may well be rooted in the perception that “Atlanta” and “Georgia” are two different entities. Winfield Ward Murray, an adjunct professor at Morehouse College, wrote in 2018, “I had always described myself as a native Atlantan, not a native Georgian. To me, there’s a difference.” A lot of big cities perceive themselves as being so culturally, socially, economically, and politically different from the rest of their states — “the sticks” — that they might as well be a different country — think of deep-blue Chicago in otherwise-red Illinois, or the old description of Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the corners, and Alabama in the middle.”
But this also reeks of shameless political opportunism on the part of the Democrats. When their candidates win and they get their way, the state is a microcosm of the best of America: home of Coca-Cola, Home Depot, UPS, the CDC, peaches and Jimmy Carter — and the inspirational subject of Ray Charles’s classic song. When their party loses and they don’t get their way, Georgia suddenly transforms into a detestable backwater basket case, struggling to let go of the hateful legacies of the Confederacy and segregation.
Democrats really want Biden (or whomever the Democratic nominee is) to win Georgia again in 2024, so lots of Democrats think it’s time to sing the praises of Georgia again.
Oh, and one of the Democratic officials who signed that letter endorsing Atlanta as the convention site was Cincinnati mayor Aftab Pureval. Thankfully, Pureval did not offer any trash talk about Cincinnati’s convention center being the father of New York’s or Chicago’s convention sites.
ADDENDUM: As noted yesterday, two years into Joe Biden’s presidency, we now know that there are two types of major mainstream-media pieces written about Vice President Kamala Harris: The first type is a profile piece that concludes, “Harris is in trouble,” and the second type is, “Harris has turned the corner.” The Washington Post offers another detailed “Harris is in trouble” piece, and the record of the past two years indicates that most of the “Harris has turned the corner” pieces have been wishful thinking. She is what she is, and there’s no communications strategy, new staff, or new initiative that will change public perceptions of her.