Author: Charles Hayslett
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The making of a political earthquake that tipped the U.S. Senate
If football is a game of inches, politics is one of fractions — a glacial shift in demographics, incremental growth in voter registration, tiny changes in voter turnout. In isolation, individual events like these may seem small and insignificant. In combination, they are like the grinding of tectonic plates that can remake an entire landscape.…
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George Berry’s ‘crescent of poverty’ now an economic and political conundrum for Georgia Republicans
In the summer of 1969, a Hawkinsville, Ga., state legislator named John Henry Anderson opined to his hometown newspaper that rural Georgia was subsidizing the City of Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest municipality. That news item somehow caught the attention of Ivan Allen, Jr., then mayor of Atlanta, and he was not pleased. He…
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Introducing the New TIGC
Welcome to the new and improved Trouble in God’s Country. TIGC was first set up as a simple blog about a dozen years ago. I decided months ago that it was long overdue for a facelift and a technological overhaul. What you’re looking at now is the result. Visually, I hope it’s more appealing and…
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New NAEP documents Covid-19’s staggering impact on K-12 students, but begs a question: How much worse was damage in rural areas?
One of the stories I was working on late last year, when my wife’s illness forced me to take a hiatus from TIGC, was a deeper dive into the state’s K-12 performance. Up until then, my evaluation of education at a county level had focused on educational attainment levels; I was studying local populations after…
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Mapping the rise and fall of Georgia per capita income performance
In my last piece, I summarized some of my recent research into the per capita income (PCI) “cold case” I’ve been noodling over for the past year or so and promised several follow-ups. This is the first of those. As a starting point, I thought it might be useful to spread some key data points…
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More TIGC lessons from the 2022 governor’s race
Further notes from a deep (and continuing) dive into the results of Georgia’s 2020 General Election: Georgia is as divided politically as it is economically, educationally, and health-wise — and those divisions have all taken shape over roughly the same time period. I’ll start here with a little history lesson. In 1990, Lt. Governor Zell…
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Early TIGC lessons from Tuesday’s gubernatorial election
Yesterday’s gubernatorial election showed us at least a couple of things, neither of which was particularly surprising. The first is that there is no apparent reason for Democratic candidates to venture into rural Georgia again. To her credit, Stacey Abrams, the party’s gubernatorial nominee for the second time, made a game effort in rural Georgia,…
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A first look at some new educational attainment data for Georgia’s counties (it ain’t pretty)
Lately I’ve been wallowing around in about a dozen different datasets and working on at least as many posts without getting any of them finished. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but there are moments when I miss having an editor yelling at me. So, now I’ve started yelling at myself and have given myself…
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New record of 123 Georgia counties reported more deaths than births in 2021; statewide gap between births and deaths narrowest on record
The number of Georgia counties recording more deaths than births jumped again in 2021, due largely to a rising death toll that owed primarily to a combination of Covid-19 fatalities and lethal drug overdoses, according to data published Friday by the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH). The total number of Georgia’s 159 counties reporting…
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Chapter III in my ongoing post-mortem of Georgia’s PCI performance from 1980-2020
Late last year, I posted two pieces about Georgia’s per capita income (PCI) performance. I hadn’t intended to do that. My original objective had been to take a quick look at a new release of 2020 PCI data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), knock out a quick one-off, and move on. But…