Category: General
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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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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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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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Early TIGC notes on the 2020 election and the two political Georgias
Trouble in God’s Country’s preliminary take on Tuesday’s still-being-counted presidential election results: First, Georgia’s overall political map won’t change much if at all. President Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Democratic nominee Joe Biden are carrying the same counties their parties have carried in the past few election cycles, as this map illustrates. Trump will carry…
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Revisiting the Gwinnett County-South Georgia comparison (Part I)
I’ve made reference in at least one earlier post to my poor and often meandering research habits. Well, I’ve done it again. Recently I started thinking about updating a post I published in December 2016 comparing 56 South Georgia counties to Gwinnett County alone and somehow wound up researching global birth rates. It’s really not…
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Political common ground hard to find in Georgia. Literally.
A few days after Georgia’s 2018 elections, I did a quick analysis and wrote a piece positing that the state’s widening urban-rural divide went beyond economics and education and extended to politics. Rural areas seemed to be going more and more Republican while urban and suburban areas were trending more Democratic. Recently I’ve finally gotten…