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Posts tagged ‘Stacey Abrams’

Nov 17

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 Miller, a Democrat, made his first run for governor and defeated his Republican opponent, State Senator Johnny Isakson, by 8.3 percentage points. In our just completed 2022 gubernatorial contest, incumbent Republican Brian Kemp defeated his Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams by a comparable 7.6 points.

But the way Miller and Kemp assembled their winning majorities could not have been more different — and this is important to understanding our current political environment and the challenges the state faces in reconciling the differences between Atlanta and Notlanta.

In 1990, 45 counties were decided by less than 10 percentage points. This year, only 10 counties were decided by that margin. In 1990, Miller cracked 70 percent of the vote in a grand total of seven counties. This year, Kemp hit that threshold in 90 counties, including four where he rolled up 90 percent of the vote and 31 where he broke 80 percent. One of those 80 percent counties was Miller’s native Towns County; in 1990, Towns County voters gave their native son 73.5 percent of their vote; this year, they gave Kemp 84.5 percent.

These maps offer political portraits of Georgia in 1990 and 2022. Over the course of three decades, nearly every rural county in the state switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP — but that’s not the most important takeaway from these maps.

The most important takeaway is the extent of that switch. The darker the red or blue, the higher the percentage of the vote each party received. While Democrats dominated the state in 1990, its winning map was made up largely of pastel blues while the 2022 map features darker shades of blood red throughout most of the state.

In the last century, the vast majority of the state was politically competitive. Few if any counties tilted so heavily in one direction that it made no sense for candidates from the other party to campaign in them. Generally, there were enough votes in play almost everywhere to justify at least a quick campaign stop and press interview by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Indeed, in 1980, Norman Underwood, who was seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat then held by Herman Talmadge, made campaigning in every single county in the state a significant element of his platform. The only part of the pledge that seemed dubious was whether he had the logistical wherewithal and the time — in a relatively short campaign — to meander all over the state (my recollection is that he made it). This year, when Democrat Abrams started her campaign in rural Randolph County and vowed to campaign in “every region” of the state, some observers (yours truly included) wondered if that was a good use of her time and money.

I don’t know where the tipping point is, but it seems to me that communities that tilt 75 or 80 percent in either direction might be fairly regarded as hostile territory by the other party, and not worth significant campaign time or resources.

Moreover, the same forces that shape the political and electoral environment animate the policy-making thinking of legislators elected by those respective communities. I submit that’s true whether you’re considering the challenges facing rural Georgia or the hot-button cultural issues that have a way of working their way into the General Assembly.

(Case in point, stay tuned for more on Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney’s ruling that Governor Kemp’s vaunted anti-abortion “heartbeat bill” is unconstitutional under Georgia law. That drops the hottest of hot potatoes onto the Gold Dome and confronts the Republican majority in the General Assembly with a choice between trying to pass a new bill or waiting to see if the appellate courts reverse McBurney’s decision.)

Another key takeaway from last week’s election results is that Abrams lost significant ground in just about every major urban county in the state. In last week’s first hot take on the election, TIGC focused on the results in Georgia’s rural counties, where Abrams lost ground against her 2018 performance. Your humble TIGC scribe was focused on the rural trees, and in the process I overlooked the larger statewide forest: the picture was pretty much the same everywhere, and for Team Abrams that picture was not pretty.

In traditionally reliable urban climes, Abrams’s losses appear to be due first and foremost to plunging turnout numbers — drops which were largely matched by drops in her own vote totals. This was true in Metro Atlanta and in other Democratic strongholds across the state. Particularly disappointing to Abrams had to be the results of vote-rich DeKalb and Gwinnett. Compared to the 2018 governor’s race, those two counties saw their total turnout plunge by more than 15,000 votes each, and Abrams’s vote totals suffered similar drops (see table below).

The picture was much the same in deep blue fortresses along the gnat line — Muscogee, Bibb and Richmond — as well as Chatham County and elsewhere. In those four counties alone, Abrams saw her vote total versus 2018 drop nearly 17,000 votes, while Kemp fattened his total (in, again, Democratic territory) by more than 3,300 votes. In TIGC’s 12-county Metro Atlanta region, Abrams’s margin over Kemp fell from 62.2%-to-37.8% in 2018 to 59.5%-to-40.5% in this year’s election. In the process, Kemp boosted his Metro Atlanta totals by nearly 46,000 over his 2018 numbers while Abrams saw hers fall by more than 60,000.

Meanwhile, Kemp was also mopping up in Atlanta’s northern ‘burbs. Following the 2020 presidential election, I wrote that the GOP was working to build a political Maginot Line across North Georgia and that the North Georgia hills were the future home base for the state’s Republican Party. The leading edge of that line is the fast-growing suburban and exurban precincts across north Atlanta.

In recent election cycles, Democrats had made gains in those areas, winning Cobb and Gwinnett counties and cutting into GOP margins in Cherokee, Forsyth and other counties. This time around, Kemp & Company held the line and regained fair chunks of lost ground (as the table below shows). Indeed, in contrast to the situation in virtually every Democratic stronghold, voters turned out in bigger numbers in Cherokee, Forsyth and other hill country counties. There was a smidgen of good news for Abrams in these numbers: she grew her vote totals in Cherokee and Forsyth, but only by a fraction of Kemp’s gains.

And, yes, it looks like ticket-splitting really happened this time around. Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock — being challenged by Trump-backed former UGA football star Herschel Walker — outpolled Abrams in all 159 counties and rolled up nearly 132,000 more votes than she got. That gave him a lead going into the December 6th runoff against Walker.

Stay tuned for more on what all this is likely to mean.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Sep 8

Stacey Abrams does an interview with TIGC. It was pretty long. Here’s Chapter One.

A couple of months ago, I began tracking the approach our gubernatorial candidates – incumbent Republican Brian Kemp and Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams – were taking toward rural Georgia and its mounting problems.  I started doing this after reading that Abrams had launched her campaign in Cuthbert, Ga., a tiny town near the Alabama line in southwest Georgia.  My first reaction was that Abrams had somehow gotten lost, but it turns out she did this on purpose.

After that, I scoured the Kemp and Abrams campaign websites for evidence of their approach to rural Georgia and eventually reached out to the Abrams campaign with two requests.  One was to talk with the campaign team members helping to craft her rural policies.  The other was to interview Abrams herself.  Over a period of a few weeks, I had a couple of conversations about rural issues with campaign staff members and volunteers. 

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams speaks outside of closed hospital in Cuthbert, Georgia, Monday, March 14, 2022.

Then last Friday I interviewed Abrams herself, and one thing became quickly apparent: the person crafting Stacey Abrams’s rural policies was Stacey Abrams herself. 

The interview ran just under less than an hour and yielded more material than I could possibly cram into a single post.  In the course of the interview, we covered a range of topics in some depth – education, healthcare, economic development, and the complicated politics facing any Democrat trying to harvest votes in bright red rural Georgia these days.  Over the next few days, I plan to post several posts reporting on Abrams’s views on these subjects.

To open the interview, I threw her a softball.  Talk to me, I said, about how you view the complicated set of problems facing rural Georgia, and about how you would tackle them.  Does state government have the tactical tools it needs to help rural Georgia?  Or do we need a new strategic approach? 

“For me, the goal in rural Georgia is not to become Atlanta, but it is to be able to be self-sustaining and successful within the construct of being small and not having your neighbors live right on top of you.  It is the ability to have the amenities of rural with the modernity of time… “

–stacey abrams

I hereby yield the floor to Ms. Abrams.  Her answers and comments, lightly edited for length, follow.

“We have the tools,” she said, “but they’re jumbled, they are often misused, and they rarely target with the precision necessary to address the challenge…. Rural economic decline is real.  Population decline is real.  There has been insufficient funding of education.  There is a very marked lack of quality healthcare.  There is crumbling and sometimes non-existent infrastructure.  And there has been a lack of economic opportunity that has really focused more on sort of big-game hunting to bring in solutions for targeted counties. 

“But the systemic and I would say sustainable approach has been missing and what is more concerning to me is that the solutions are often premised on leveraging the poverty as opposed to solving the poverty. Meaning, that Georgia often touts economic development coming to the state by saying you don’t have to pay fair wages, that it is the low-income, low-wealth nature of our state that is used as a selling point. Which then means that those who bring jobs do not bring those kinds of jobs that could lift economic capacity, (that) could address those economic challenges…

“For me, the goal in rural Georgia is not to become Atlanta, but it is to be able to be self-sustaining and successful within the construct of being small and not having your neighbors live right on top of you.  It is the ability to have the amenities of rural with the modernity of time, and that’s what’s missing too often in a rural community.  That billions of dollars in tax revenue have been spent on essentially bringing in out-of-state corporations who come to Georgia not simply to create jobs but to create jobs that are not going to lift all of our communities, and that has a concomitant effect of also depressing those who stay and driving out those who might have stayed.

“And so, when I think about how we tackle the challenge of rural Georgia, it is to first acknowledge the repeated failures of recent administrations that have overseen a decline in real wages, a decline in economic capacity, a decline in education, a decline in healthcare, a decline in infrastructure, a decline across the board.  And to not cherry pick the winners.  

“My mission is to focus on reinvestment but also to think about placemaking.  How do we ensure that the nature of our small towns and rural communities are celebrated and that that celebration actually has economic effects? How do we revitalize? And then how do we expand? Because there are some places that have never seen opportunity.  When you go into those communities whether you’re talking about parts of Chattooga County or parts of Randolph County, where the rumor of opportunity has been about in the land for years, but never actually manifested. That’s the kind of work that I want to do (and) why my focus on rural communities is so strong.”

Here I interrupted Abrams and asked her a couple of questions.  One was whether she was suggesting it was wrong to recruit companies like Rivian and Hyundai, both of which have chosen sites in Georgia under Kemp’s watch?  Or Kia, which was recruited to west Georgia under Governor Sonny Perdue more than 15 years ago?

“Well let’s start with that.  No, it’s not a mistake to bring in jobs.  The challenge is, which jobs are you bringing in?  And what are you doing to ensure that those jobs lead to long-term economic lift for everyone?  My challenge and my critique is that bringing in those jobs is not the end of the story. It is part of the story but too often it becomes the whole of the story — that because you can tout some massive corporation coming in that will absolutely have economic benefit, then you are absolved of responsibility for all of the places that still have nothing. 

“And you get a really great headline and real-world, real-time improvement for some. But the long-term impact on others is that nothing happens. That’s deeply problematic or worse than nothing happening. Things actually continue to deteriorate. So, great for Troup County; that is fantastic. And I would never begrudge the success.  But if you’re in Early County, what happened in Troup County is not changing your outcome, and, in fact, it is now, once again, distracting from the very real needs that you have.”

The other question I asked Abrams when I interrupted her was for more of a “nuts-and-bolts” focus on how she would act on her vision for rural Georgia – and how she would pay for it.  Following are two chunks of her response, and we’ll expand on these in the next post.

Chunk One: “So here are the nuts-and-bolts… One is investment.  How do we make investment more effective and efficient? And what are those investment needs?  The major investment needs in Georgia for rural communities are education, Infrastructure, and small business.”

Chunk Two focused on financing those investments, and there’s a lot more to come here.  Basically, Abrams contends that – thanks in part to a huge influx in federal funding and a healthy state budget surplus – Georgia is now in a position to make some unprecedented investments in the present and the future.  She also identifies this as a “fundamental philosophical difference” between her and Kemp.

“Here’s the analogy I use,” she says.  “We’ve got a house (whose) roof has been leaking for years and every time there’s a hard rain, the basement floods.  And so we’re used to going up on the roof, patching the roof, and we go bail out the basement.  We finally have the money to replace the roof and fix the plumbing.  That’s what I want us to do, because if you replace the roof and fix the plumbing, it doesn’t mean the new storms won’t come, but when they come, we’re actually focused on other challenges. We’re not focused on, do we have to find more buckets for the roof?  We’ve actually solved that problem.  Using the surplus to invest in the next twenty years of Georgia opportunity is the smartest way to use this money because it does not require that we borrow from the future to solve the present.  It tells us if we invest in the present, we’re actually better situated for the future.”

We’ll flesh out these chunks – and other topics – in the next post. Watch this space.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Jul 7

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Stacey Abrams pursues a risky campaign strategy

It’s increasingly clear that Stacey Abrams is pursuing a high-risk – dare I say foolhardy? – strategy in her quest for the office of Georgia governor. 

She’s actually asking voters to think.

What I haven’t been able to decide is whether this was her plan all along?  Or if she backed herself into a corner with her “inelegant” (as she later put it) statement that Georgia is “the worst state” in which to live?

Abrams, the Democratic Party’s gubernatorial nominee, was complaining at an event in May about incumbent Republican Governor Brian Kemp’s incessant invocation of an economic development trade publication’s ranking of Georgia as “the top state for doing business” when she flipped that on its head and offered up the “worst state in the country to live” comment.

The statement was widely panned by Kemp and some in the media as a gaffe.  In a Facebook thread, one politically savvy friend bluntly criticized it as “a dumb, unforced error.”  Another, the estimable Bill Cotterell, long ago UPI’s man at the Georgia State Capitol and now a semi-retired political columnist for The Tallahassee Democrat, offered a more complete explanation.  “My kid might be ugly,” he said, “but you’re not going to win my vote by proving it to me.“

Probably not, but Abrams seems determined to give it her best shot – and for what it’s worth, she’s no stranger to novel political strategies.  When she first took on Kemp four years ago, she came closer to winning than any Democrat in the current millennium by running as an unapologetic progressive.  Four years earlier, Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn, progeny of the state’s two leading Democratic families, got clobbered by running GOP lite campaigns for governor and U.S. Senate.

The Kemp camp, meanwhile, has been positively and predictably gleeful in its reactions – but in the process, it may have overreached.  Kemp and his minions delighted in whacking Abrams about the head and shoulders with press statements and tweets. “Stacey Abrams may think differently,” Kemp harrumphed on Twitter, “but I believe Georgia is the best state to live, work, and raise a family.” To have done less would have been political malpractice, a felony in Georgia.

But then they took it a step further and focused their first ad of the campaign on the issue.  The 30-second spot features Abrams making her “inelegant” statement followed by a handful of headlines favorable to Kemp, after which a narrator declares that Kemp has “kept Georgia the best place to live.”

Really?   

Here, we should pause to recognize the difference in campaign strategies.  If Abrams is asking voters to think, Kemp is asking them not to; instead, he wants them to feel. 

For what it’s worth, his is the more traditional and time-tested approach.  Voters arguably vote their hearts far more than their heads, and appealing to their sense of pride (“best place to live”) no doubt works better in that regard than insulting them (“worst place to live”).

But Kemp’s “best place to live” claim is such an overreach that it merits a TIGC fact-check, and we give it a half-dozen Pinocchios and a pair of flaming tighty-whities.  First, the ad’s messaging logic (for lack of a better word) merits scrutiny (not to mention a belly laugh).  After spotlighting Abrams’s “worst state” comment, the ad features a montage of positive business headlines that are then used as a springboard to the “best place to live” claim.

A strong local economy is obviously critical to a community’s overall viability, but economic development doesn’t automatically lead to quality-of-life improvements and the two don’t always go hand in hand. Further, it seems worth noting that the much-vaunted business ranking from Area Development magazine focuses exclusively on business considerations and does not, as nearly as TIGC has been able to discern, factor in quality-of-life metrics.

Indeed, at least one of the key categories Area Development uses to measure and compare the 50 states seems to be at odds with improving the economic livelihood of individual Georgia citizens. More than 30 years ago, the General Assembly created a job tax credit program that measured the economic standing of Georgia’s counties by three key metrics — unemployment, poverty, and per capita income. Counties that scored poorly by those measures would be targeted with generous tax credits to encourage businesses to set up shop and create jobs in them.

Through the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s, Georgia made remarkable progress on arguably the most important of those three — per capita income (as TIGC has documented in previous posts, here, here, and here). Between 1980 and the end of the century, the state’s average PCI rose from 84.5 percent of the national average to 95 percent, and our rank among the 50 states climbed from 38th to 24th.

In the first decade of the current century, Georgia’s PCI performance fell back to 1980 levels; as of 2010, our average PCI was 85.6 percent of the national average and we ranked 40th among the 50 states. That reversal of fortune coincided with the transition of political power at the State Capitol from Democrat to Republican. While it’s difficult to determine cause and effect, the state’s first GOP governor in modern times, Sonny Perdue, presided during his eight years in office over a 15-place drop in the national rankings. Only one state suffered a bigger drop during that same period; Delaware fell 16 places.

Since then, the state’s PCI performance has been relatively static, bobbing up and down slightly first under Governor Nathan Deal and now under Kemp. As of the end of 2020, Kemp’s second year in office, the state’s average PCI was up to 87 percent of the national average but our rank remained 40th among the 50 states.

In Area Development’s view, that’s apparently not a bad thing. Georgia, for instance, tied with Texas for the No. 1 spot in a category called “Competitive Labor Market,” about which the magazine said, in part: “Companies choosing locations in Georgia and Texas appreciate the fact that they both have wages below the average in more than half of all other states … “

That wasn’t true when the Republicans came to power, but it certainly is now — with the ironic consequence that Georgia’s claim to being the No. 1 state for business is predicated in part on the fact that its citizens earn less on average than their counterparts in 39 other states.

Area Development, however, isn’t the only media outlet that ranks states for their overall business environment. CNBC has been doing the same thing since 2007, and Georgia generally fares well in its rankings as well; the state finished in CNBC’s Top 10 every year except 2008 and claimed 1st place in 2014.

CNBC’s methodology has evolved over time, however, and recently it added a category it calls “Life, Health & Inclusion.” Here, the news for Georgia is not so good.

CNBC even published an online sidebar under the headline “These 10 states are America’s worst places to live in 2021.” In this “Life, Health & Inclusion” category, Georgia got an “F” and finished 6th — that is, as the 6th worst place to live in America. Behind Alabama.

Let me repeat that: Behind Alabama.

The challenge for Abrams is in communicating this kind of information in ways that rile voters up without turning them off. If Kemp is trying to make voters feel good about Georgia as a place to live, Abrams should be trying to make them mad. So far, I’m not sure she’s accomplishing that. Most of her critiques (that I’ve seen) have focused on the state as a whole.

She’s up on social media, for example, with an ad that spotlights 82 Georgia counties that don’t have any OB/GYNs and another (below right) that lists the state’s poor ranking in a number of health-related categories. Whether that kind of messaging cuts through remains to be seen. I don’t have the benefit of any polling data, but I’m skeptical that statewide numbers resonate at local levels.

Take, for example, Brantley County. Located in deep southeast Georgia, Brantley County ranks near the bottom of every national economic, educational, and health analysis I’ve conducted. Nationally, it ranks in the bottom one percent of U.S. counties for per capita income, the bottom five percent for educational attainment, and the bottom 13 percent for premature death — and it’s actually doing better than a fair number of its neighboring rural Georgia counties.

But the thing that distinguishes Brantley County is that it’s the most Republican county in the entire state. In the 2016 presidential election, Brantley County voters gave Donald Trump 88 percent of their vote. In the governor’s race two years later, they went for Kemp by an even bigger margin — 91.3 percent to 8.1 percent for Abrams. In the 2020 presidential race, they sided 10-to-1 with Trump: 90.3 percent for the incumbent Republican to 9.0 percent for Joe Biden.

If voters anywhere ought to be frustrated with their economic, education, and health situations, you’d think it would be the folks in Brantley County — especially since they’ve been losing ground in recent years. In 2002, the last year a Democrat occupied the governor’s office, its average PCI was 63.3 percent of the national average; in 2020, the latest year for which data is available, Brantley’s average PCI was down to 50.4 percent of the national average.

Kemp, of course, is at no risk of losing Brantley County, but if Abrams succeeds at getting even a small fraction of voters there and in other beleaguered blood-red counties to think about something other than the party label, it just might make a difference.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2022

Apr 5

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Moving the All-Star game punished the wrong Georgia

President Biden and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred apparently never got the memo about the Two Georgias.

That’s about the only conclusion to be drawn from their reaction to the enactment of Georgia Senate Bill 202, aka “The Election Integrity Act of 2021.” When Biden publicly urged the MLB to strip Atlanta of this year’s MLB All-Star game, he was basically calling in friendly fire on his own party’s home turf in perhaps the most politically important state in the nation right now.

More specifically, he targeted Cobb County, home of the Atlanta Braves’ Truist Park and designated site of the 2021 All-Star game. Long a bastion of GOP strength, Cobb County finally tipped Democratic in 2016 and then gave Biden a 56,000-vote margin in 2020. Kudos to the political wizards who helped him think that one through.

Georgia has been undergoing an almost biological cellular division for nearly a half-century now. With every passing year, Metro Atlanta and the rest of the state have drifted further and further apart in just about every measurable way — including economics, educational attainment and population health.

And politics. The earliest sightings of Republicans in modern Georgia took place in metropolitan Atlanta about 50 years ago. They clawed their way to prominence and ultimately dominance at county courthouses in fast-growing suburban Atlanta counties and then began to infiltrate the state legislature.

Since then, Democrats have reasserted control at most Atlanta-area county governments, but Republicans have invaded and now all but own rural Georgia — and the State Capitol. It plainly escaped the attention of the White House and the MLB that the sponsors of S.B. 202 hail not from Atlanta, Decatur, Lawrenceville or Marietta, but from such far-flung rural climes as Sylvania, Danielsville, Cataula, Chickamauga, Perry, Ocilla and Vidalia.

If economic punishment was the goal, a better strategy might have been to rattle some budgetary sabers at, for example, Augusta’s Fort Gordon, which sits next door to the Senate District represented by Senator Max Burns (R-Sylvania), who chairs the Senate Ethics Committee that produced the final version of S.B. 202 and is listed as its No. 1 sponsor, as well as other South Georgia military installations and federal facilities.

If, instead, the objective was political humiliation, you’d think they might have noticed that Burns’s sprawling, largely-rural east-Georgia district also sweeps into Augusta and brackets a certain well-tended golf course that will be ground zero for the sports media for the next several days.

Not for nothing, the 2021 Master’s Tournament, as it does every Covid-free year, will double as a post-legislative party scene for lobbyists and lawmakers and an entertainment venue for the state’s well-heeled corporate leaders, who will no doubt have to spend some of their time trying to convince their out-of-state customers and prospects that the state is not actually run by knuckle-dragging racists.

It may be a tough sell. A betting man might wager that Stacey Abrams and her minions will find their way to the gates of Augusta National in time to make the evening news. And that the estimable U.S. Representative James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) will cross the Savannah River to lend a hand. Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper can probably be expected to set up live shots at the Amen Corner.

For what it’s worth, my reading of the bill and various analyses is that there’s a fair argument to be made that the legislation is not quite as horrific as first thought. As an example, Democrats complained mightily that the legislation will greatly restrict ballot drop boxes used in the last election for absentee ballot applications and actual ballots. But drop boxes didn’t exist at all prior to the last election cycle; Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger used the emergency powers of his office to authorize them during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, at least, the use of a limited number of such boxes (to be located inside government buildings and available during business hours) is codified into state law.

Another relatively innocuous change cuts the window prior to elections for applying for absentee ballots from six months to, for some odd reason, 78 days. That strikes me as plenty of time to apply for an absentee ballot — although responding to a flood of requests in a shorter window of time could stress elections offices in big counties — which, frankly, might help give the state the excuse it needs to exercise a new power it just gave itself to step in and fire local elections superintendents.

Beyond that, S.B. 202 really is pretty horrific. It’s difficult to read it and avoid a judgment that it will make voting harder in large urban Democratic counties, especially in minority precincts, and easier in mostly Republican rural counties. (This subject deserves a screed of its own, which I’ll try to get to later; in the meantime, a good analysis appears in today’s New York Times.)

But even if the final version of S.B. 202 was totally benign, motive and intent matter. Stampeded following the 2020 election by a zombie-like army of Trump-enthralled rural voters convinced that their own party’s leaders had stolen the election for Biden, Republican legislators began drafting bills that stopped just short of requiring DNA tests to get an absentee ballot. Early versions of the legislation were so repellant that the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, proclaimed himself “disgusted” and refused to preside over the State Senate’s consideration of the bill, and four GOP senators found a way to avoid voting on that version of the bill.

Optics matter too. The provision outlawing giving food and water to voters stuck in long voting lines — as minority voters in urban areas often are — was amazingly bone-headed. So was Governor Brian Kemp’s decision to sign the bill behind closed doors while flanked by White legislators and sitting under a painting of a plantation — and then, for God’s sake, to put out an official photograph of the historic event.

Add to this that while Kemp was signing the bill into law, a Black female state legislator who’d had the temerity to knock on the governor’s door was being put in handcuffs, arrested and hauled away by a pair of well-fed state troopers — in full view of multiple video cameras and cellphones.

At that point, any substantive case that might — might — have been made for the law was a lost cause. “Georgia G.O.P. Passes Major Law to Limit Voting Amid Nationwide Push,” thundered The New York Times. From The Washington Post: “As Georgia’s new law shows, when Black people gain local power, states strip that power away.”

Enter now the White House and Major League Baseball, and recognize that the laws of physics also apply to politics: for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. Put another way, if Republicans do something stupid, they can count on the Democrats to do something just as stupid right back.

Thus did Biden and the MLB lurch into ready/fire/aim mode and deprive businesses and employees in an increasingly Democratic part of the state of, according to a Cobb Travel and Tourism executive, more than $100 million in projected cash flow.

Clearly, one of the Two Georgias deserved all this economic pain, radioactive headlines and political opprobrium — but it wasn’t Metro Atlanta or Cobb County. Now, though, the problem isn’t just that Atlanta is paying an economic price for rural Georgia’s retrograde politics, it’s that there’s almost certainly more to come.

As AJC sports columnist Steve Hummer put it this weekend, “The loss of baseball’s All-Star game was just the beginning. Why, with a little more work from those beneath the Gold Dome, we can become Birmingham before you know it.”

“Why,” he added a few paragraphs later, “would any major sporting league – or major company for that matter – want to have anything to do with a leadership that so eagerly gives credence to a bald-faced lie?”

Here he makes an important point. The Georgia General Assembly adjourned last week after devoting much of its legislative energy to producing a 98-page law based spawned entirely by President Trump’s fictitious claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

One byproduct of that legislative disaster is that it spawned a political virus for which there is no obvious vaccine — and no way of knowing where or how it might spread. Aside from the economic development implications, it doesn’t take much imagination to wonder whether the 5-star Black athletes now dressing out for Kirby Smart’s Georgia Bulldogs might begin to think twice about playing football in a state where the Legislature apparently wants to hinder their right to vote.

If, for instance, running back Zamir “Zeus” White and wide receiver Georgia Pickens were to even glance in the direction of the transfer portal because of the new law, let’s just say that the likely opposite reaction would be very unequal — and would require Governor Kemp to build a bigger fence around the State Capitol to hold the UGA alumni association at bay.

If the recent presidential and Senate elections marked tipping points in Georgia politics, the enactment of S.B. 202 may prove to be an even more important inflection point in the long-running political war between Metro Atlanta and rural Georgia. My hunch as well is that one opposite and equal reaction to S.B. 202 is that voter outrage in Metro Atlanta will remain at a boiling point through the 2022 election cycle. Bad press for depriving voters standing in long lines of food and water may prove to be the least of the Republicans’ problems.

In the Two Georgias, a big, mega-million dollar hit on Metro Atlanta and Cobb County is a small price for Senator Burns and his colleagues to pay to calm the Trump-inflamed fever swamps they represent.

In fact, it’s no price at all. Which is the problem. Burns’s hometown of Sylvania is more than 200 miles from Truist Park, and most of his fellow GOP colleagues live at least 100 miles from the ballpark.

At the risk of being uncharitable, I can’t help but wonder if some of these legislators — and their constituents — aren’t laughing up their sleeves (if not out loud) at Metro Atlanta’s misfortune. For them, S.B. 202 was a two-fer. Not only did they weaken the region politically, they nicked it for tens of millions of dollars in business in the process.

I’ll close by suggesting that this need not be the end of the opening chapter of this story. Georgia’s newly-empowered Democrats in Washington — led by Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — should make this case to the White House and Major League Baseball and implore them to reverse the All-Star game decision. It may not be too late, and a reversal would undo a major mistake and set the stage for a discussion about how to exact economic retribution on those who actually deserve it.

(c) Copyright Trouble in God’s Country 2021

Nov 2

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Will 2020 be rural Georgia’s last stand?

This year’s presidential election — and tomorrow’s election-day voting — is shaping up as another rematch in the long-running political war between urban and rural Georgia. The big question is whether rural Georgia can hold off Metro Atlanta’s rising urban and suburban tide one more time.

While demographics are clearly working against the state’s rural regions, they have managed to hang on at least until now; in 2018, rural voters turned out in bigger droves than their urban counterparts and dragged Brian Kemp across the finish line and into the governor’s office.

There’s little evidence in this year’s political tea leaves to suggest that rural Georgia’s task has gotten any easier. One of the biggest clues has been President Trump’s own campaign strategy. The fact that he’s been here twice in the past two weeks makes it clear that Georgia is indeed in play (as do virtually all the recent state polls), but it’s the way he’s campaigned here that’s the dead give-away.

Instead of making a public play for the suburban women whose votes he publicly covets, he’s gone instead to Macon and Rome, regional communities that anchor surrounding rural areas that gave him overwhelming majorities in 2016. Clearly, Trump’s strategic objective is to juice his rural base and maximize its turnout, not to try to reclaim suburbs that may be slipping away.

Beyond Trump’s own campaign tactics, the most attention-getting data point I’ve found is that the 29 counties that voted for Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018 have cast 345,304 more absentee and in-person early votes than voters in the 130 largely rural counties that sided with Kemp. I mined that figure from the excellent georgiavotes.com website, which pulls data from the Georgia Secretary of State’s website and organizes it for easy public consumption.

It’s difficult (for me, at least) to read those numbers in any way except that the Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, has probably built up a pretty good advantage in the early vote and will begin tomorrow morning with a fair Georgia lead over Trump. The question for Trump’s rural Georgia supporters is whether they can replicate the 2018 turnout advantage and overcome what looks like an early Biden wave.

In 2018, the 130 largely rural counties that went for Kemp produced higher turnouts than the Abrams counties in both the early vote and the total vote. In the early vote, the Kemp counties produced 34.3 percent of their eligible vote versus 31.7 percent for the Abrams counties; by the time all the votes were tallied, the Kemp counties’ turnout was 62.1 percent versus 60.6 for the Abrams counties. That difference was arguably decisive.

So far this year, the Democrats appear to be doing a good bit better: the early vote turnout in the 29 Abrams counties (driven no doubt by Covid-19 concerns as well as heightened interest in the presidential race) is 51.8 percent versus 52.4 percent in the Kemp counties — a mere half-point difference.

Even with the improved numbers, Biden and the Democrats face some notable soft spots. One problem that seems to be repeating itself is the turnout performance difference between Metro Atlanta’s white north side and black south side.

For example, in the 2018 governor’s race, heavily white and overwhelmingly Republican Forsyth County, on Metro Atlanta’s northern edge, turned out 64.9 percent of its registered voters and gave Kemp 70.6 percent of those votes; the south side’s Clayton County, heavily black and Abrams’s strongest county, delivered only 54.4 percent of its available vote.

This year, the divide is even bigger so far: 67.6 percent of Forsyth’s registered voters have cast their ballots versus only 43.6 percent Clayton County’s. Other heavily-black, Democratic counties also seem to be under-performing in the early vote: Bibb County at 46 percent; Dougherty, 33.5 percent, and Richmond, 43.8 percent, among others.

A final question is whether the state will continue the red-to-blue shift that has been taking place over the past several election cycles, and all these challenges are, of course, intertwined. Democrats lost Georgia by five points in the 2016 presidential race and by less than two in the governor’s race in 2018. If they can gain that much ground again this year, Biden will carry Georgia and win its 16 electoral votes. Pumping up those turnout percentages in Bibb, Dougherty and Richmond, et al, is probably key to that.

(c) Trouble in God’s Country 2020

Sep 18

1 Comment

Covid-19 case rates now slightly higher in GOP counties

We reported last week that the collective Covid-19 death rates in the largely rural and sparsely populated Georgia counties that sided with Republican Brian Kemp in the 2018 governor’s race had surpassed that of the mostly urban and densely populated counties that went for his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams.

TIGC also reported last week that the case rate trend lines were converging. We can now report that those lines have indeed crossed and that the 130 mostly rural counties that voted for Kemp and narrowly nudged him into the governor’s office now have slightly higher Covid-19 case rates than the 29 counties that went for Abrams.

Based on TIGC calculations using data pulled from the Georgia Department of Public Health’s daily Covid-19 status updates, the case rate lines appear to have crossed on September 9th, as the chart below shows. They had run at nearly identical rates for several days before that and have been steadily separating ever since.

This chart shows recent trends in confirmed Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people in the 130 counties that voted for Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, versus the 29 that sided with his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams, in the 2018 governor’s race.

The case rate trend lines have been separating slowly but steadily since they crossed about a week ago. The table below shows the case rates — the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases per 100,000 people — as the numbers tightened up around September 6th, crossed on the 9th, and then continued to separate through the 17th.

Those trends can of course change. All it would take is the emergence of a new Covid-19 hotspot in one of the state’s larger urban — and typically Democratic — counties.

For the moment, though, the current data would appear to put to rest early thinking that Covid-19 would do more damage in heavily populated urban areas. While it clearly struck first in such areas — including, of course, Metro Atlanta — it has since found its way into rural areas. Indeed, the interesection of the case and death rate trendlines coincides generally with the virus’s Sherman-like march to the sea across the state’s rural east-central and southeastern counties.

Sep 9

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Covid-19 death rate in Kemp counties now tops that in Abrams counties; case rate trend lines also converging

Here’s a little breaking news on the coronavirus front: The Covid-19 death rate is now higher, collectively, in the Georgia counties that voted for Governor Brian Kemp in 2018 than in those that went for his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. What’s more, the difference in the rate of confirmed cases is narrowing dramatically.

This is a little bit of a surprise. Early on, the virus hit densely-populated urban Democratic precincts much harder than remote, sparsely-populated Republican communities, and there was a good bit of credible speculation that the gap between the two might never fully close.

The New York Times took a deep dive into national data in late May and posited that while case and death rates were rising in conservative areas, it wasn’t “on a scale that would close the gap in the virus’s impact on red and blue counties.”

That’s no longer true in Georgia. The Covid-19 death rate in the 130 mostly rural counties carried by Kemp in 2018 squeaked past that of the 29 largely urban counties that went for Abrams on August 25th.

The Kemp and Abrams death rate trend lines converged through the middle part of August. They were nearly identical by August 24th — 47.52 deaths per 100,000 people in the Abrams counties versus 47.43 in the Kemp counties. The next day, the lines crossed — 48.37 deaths per 100,000 people in the Abrams counties versus 48.52 in the Kemp counties — and they’ve been separating, fairly rapidly, ever since, as the graph above shows.

The Abrams counties have so far suffered more overall deaths than the Kemp counties: 3,095 out of population of 5.67 million versus 2,833 out of a population of 4.95 million. But even that may be changing. Since the Kemp and Abrams death rate trendlines crossed on August 25th, there have been 785 Covid-19 deaths in Georgia. Of those, 353 occurred in the Abrams counties while 432 took place in Kemp country.

While the Abrams counties are still reporting higher rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases than the Kemp counties, those trend lines are also converging. On August 25th — the day the death rate trend lines crossed — the 29 Abrams counties had a combined confirmed case rate of 2316.7 cases per 100,000 while the combined case rate for the 130 Kemp counties was 2178.6, a difference of 6.3 percent. By September 8th, the difference was down to 1.9 percent — 2529.9 cases per 100,000 people for the Abrams counties versus 2483.2 for the Kemp counties.

Put another way, during that August 25-September 8 period, the Abrams counties reported a total of 12,089 new confirmed Covid-19 cases while the Kemp counties reported 15,069 new cases.

These trends can, of course, shift. The recent death and case rate trends appear to have been driven largely by the virus’s Sherman-like march across east-central and southeast Georgia, which is heavily rural and went overwhelmingly for Kemp. All it would take to alter — indeed, reverse — these patterns would be a major outbreak in one or more of the major urban counties.

Still, the current data and trends would appear to put to rest the early thinking that the virus would be satisfied with feasting on Democrats in densely-populated urban areas. It took it a while, but it finally found its way to virtually every corner of the state’s rural areas, which have older, less healthy populations and frailer healthcare delivery systems. Those Republican hunting grounds now appear to be just as fruitful for Covid-19 as the big Democratic cities.

May 27

Even a nonpartisan plague gets politicized in 21st century America

It was, of course, inevitable that the Covid-19 pandemic would quickly be viewed through a political lens.  I’m as guilty as anybody.  Pretty early on, I was complaining on Facebook about President Trump’s bungling of the nation’s response to the plague, and here on Trouble in God’s Country I took note of the different strategies pursued by Republican governors here in the bright red old south versus their liberal Democratic counterparts the far west.

On Monday, The New York Times published a report that took the first big look (at least that I’ve seen) at whether the ugly little virus was wreaking more havoc on Democrats or Republicans.  Under the headline “The Coronavirus is Deadliest Where Democrats Live,” the Times reported:

“Democrats are far more likely to live in counties where the virus has ravaged the community, while Republicans are more likely to live in counties that have been relatively unscathed by the illness, though they are paying an economic price. Counties won by President Trump in 2016 have reported just 27 percent of the virus infections and 21 percent of the deaths — even though 45 percent of Americans live in these communities, a New York Times analysis has found.”

I’d been thinking about doing the same sort of piece about Georgia, but was concerned that any such analysis would be flawed by a variety of factors, including limited data and questions about the extent of testing in certain parts of the state, especially rural areas.  I still have those concerns, but if the great gray lady can hold forth on this topic, so can Trouble in God’s Country.

The Times sorted national Covid-19 data by counties that voted for Trump in 2016 versus those that went for Democrat Hillary Clinton.  I used county-level data from Georgia’s 2018 governor’s race and mashed it up with Covid-19 cases and deaths reported by the Georgia Department of Public Health as of early Tuesday morning, May 26.

Georgia’s Democratic counties — the 29 that voted for Stacey Abrams in 2018 — have so far borne the brunt of the virus’s attack, but the picture here isn’t as lopsided as the national breakdown reported by the Times.

The Abrams/Democratic counties are home to 53.2 percent of the state’s population and have so far suffered 55.8 percent of the infections and 57.4 percent of the Covid-19 deaths.  The Abrams counties were for the most part heavily and densely populated urban counties, including the largest counties in Metro Atlanta, along with major out-state counties and a handful of smaller rural counties.

The 129 counties carried by the ultimate winner in that 2018 race, Republican Brian Kemp, claim 46.8 percent of the state’s population and so far have posted 44.2 percent of the Covid-19 cases and 42.6 percent of the deaths.  Governor Kemp’s counties were largely rural counties (as the map here shows). 2018 Unshaded Map

The Times also reports that: “In the country as a whole, outbreaks in conservative rural counties are rising, but not on a scale that would close the gap in the virus’s impact on red and blue counties.”

I’m skeptical that holds here in Georgia.  While Abrams’s Democratic counties have logged more cases and deaths than Kemp’s Republican counties, their overall case rates and Covid-19 death rates aren’t that different.  In Abrams’s counties, 387.8 people per 100,000 have contracted the virus and 18.3 per 100,000 have died; in Kemp’s counties, 346.3 people per 100,000 have tested positive while 15.5 per 100,000 have died.

In addition to having relatively comparable case and death rates, my analysis of an admittedly limited body of DPH data suggests that case rates in rural Georgia are ticking up at least a little faster than in urban areas.  From May 16 through May 26, case rates in the Kemp counties rose 17.6 percent versus 14.5 percent in the Abrams counties.

Two other factors contribute to my suspicion that the gap between the Kemp and Abrams counties might continue to close.  One is that it’s still not clear that sufficient testing is being done in rural counties.  The other is that there’s a growing body of polling and other data to suggest that Republicans, perhaps especially those in rural areas, are taking the virus less seriously than their Democratic counterparts and not doing as good a job of following masking and social-distancing recommendations (here’s one good story on this phenomenon).

Bottom line, while more densely-populated Democratic counties may have represented low-hanging fruit for Covid-19, it’s far from clear that it hasn’t been able to find its way to Georgia’s sparsely-populated rural counties.  If testing becomes more pervasive in rural Georgia and its residents are indeed taking a casual attitude toward the virus, the gap between the Democratic and Republican counties will almost certainly close up.

My hunch is that we’ll eventually realize that the virus itself is the only truly nonpartisan actor in this ongoing tragedy.

___________

Following are lists of the counties carried by Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, along with data on the number of positive Covid-19 cases and deaths as of the morning of May 26, 2020.  To conduct this analysis and show the totals and case rates by the two groups of counties, I had to recalculate the county-specific case rates and then calculate the totals and rates for each group.  For some reason, the case rate results I got were a little different from those published by DPH.  As the denominator, I used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 population estimates.  The equation for calculating the case rates is straightforward: (Positive Cases/2019 Population Estimates) X 100,000.  In the interest of transparency, I’m showing both the DPH Case Rates (as published on its website) and the TIGC Case Rate Calculation.

Kemp Counties:

County Positive Cases Deaths DPH Case Rate 2019 Population Estimates TIGC Case Rate Calculation
Appling 134 13 721.9 18,386 728.8
Atkinson 31 2 372.2 8,165 379.7
Bacon 77 2 675.2 11,164 689.7
Baker 33 2 1059.1 3,038 1086.2
Banks 73 0 365.3 19,234 379.5
Barrow 292 11 338.0 83,240 350.8
Bartow 443 36 399.9 107,738 411.2
Ben Hill 61 1 366.5 16,700 365.3
Berrien 37 0 192.0 19,397 190.8
Bleckley 38 0 296.0 12,873 295.2
Brantley 51 2 265.6 19,109 266.9
Brooks 67 9 426.0 15,457 433.5
Bryan 70 5 178.9 39,627 176.6
Bulloch 52 2 65.4 79,608 65.3
Burke 123 4 550.5 22,383 549.5
Butts 211 21 838.2 24,936 846.2
Camden 55 1 102.0 54,666 100.6
Candler 13 0 120.0 10,803 120.3
Carroll 472 24 392.9 119,992 393.4
Catoosa 105 0 152.7 67,580 155.4
Charlton 29 1 218.9 13,392 216.5
Chattahoochee 25 0 232.6 10,907 229.2
Chattooga 24 2 96.9 24,789 96.8
Cherokee 831 29 311.7 258,773 321.1
Clinch 56 1 841.4 6,618 846.2
Coffee 250 13 580.8 43,273 577.7
Colquitt 349 14 768.8 45,600 765.4
Columbia 224 6 141.2 156,714 142.9
Cook 46 2 263.8 17,270 266.4
Coweta 376 8 247.4 148,509 253.2
Crawford 26 0 212.6 12,404 209.6
Crisp 223 7 1000.5 22,372 996.8
Dade 27 1 167.1 16,116 167.5
Dawson 103 1 381.2 26,108 394.5
Decatur 153 4 581.3 26,404 579.5
Dodge 48 2 235.5 20,605 233.0
Dooly 172 12 1283.6 13,390 1284.5
Early 235 29 2316.2 10,190 2306.2
Echols 62 0 1562.1 4,006 1547.7
Effingham 63 1 98.4 64,296 98.0
Elbert 71 0 374.8 19,194 369.9
Emanuel 27 2 119.1 22,646 119.2
Evans 5 0 46.8 10,654 46.9
Fannin 40 1 152.0 26,188 152.7
Fayette 221 13 188.0 114,421 193.1
Floyd 228 14 228.2 98,498 231.5
Forsyth 480 12 190.1 244,252 196.5
Franklin 39 1 167.2 23,349 167.0
Gilmer 137 0 436.1 31,369 436.7
Glascock 1 0 33.1 2,971 33.7
Glynn 87 1 101.1 85,292 102.0
Gordon 138 15 237.7 57,963 238.1
Grady 93 4 379.0 24,633 377.5
Greene 64 7 341.9 18,324 349.3
Habersham 502 19 1096.1 45,328 1107.5
Hall 2327 41 1127.7 204,441 1138.2
Haralson 36 2 117.2 29,792 120.8
Harris 83 4 239.1 35,236 235.6
Hart 26 0 99.6 26,205 99.2
Heard 28 2 226.4 11,923 234.8
Houston 349 16 222.2 157,863 221.1
Irwin 24 1 254.4 9,416 254.9
Jackson 148 4 198.1 72,977 202.8
Jasper 31 1 218.3 14,219 218.0
Jeff Davis 34 1 224.5 15,115 224.9
Jenkins 18 1 209.9 8,676 207.5
Johnson 81 2 838.4 9,643 840.0
Jones 34 0 118.9 28,735 118.3
Lamar 53 1 273.9 19,077 277.8
Lanier 14 2 135.3 10,423 134.3
Laurens 104 1 219.9 47,546 218.7
Lee 354 22 1181.1 29,992 1180.3
Lincoln 15 0 184.6 7,921 189.4
Long 12 1 60.3 19,559 61.4
Lowndes 250 4 212.1 117,406 212.9
Lumpkin 91 1 269.2 33,610 270.8
Madison 39 1 129.2 29,880 130.5
Marion 49 2 590.9 8,359 586.2
McDuffie 63 5 291.7 21,312 295.6
McIntosh 12 0 82.4 14,378 83.5
Meriwether 78 2 371.1 21,167 368.5
Miller 38 0 659.3 5,718 664.6
Mitchell 399 32 1809.0 21,863 1825.0
Monroe 118 8 425.6 27,578 427.9
Montgomery 10 0 108.4 9,172 109.0
Morgan 37 0 193.3 19,276 191.9
Murray 78 1 193.7 40,096 194.5
Oconee 105 5 251.6 40,280 260.7
Oglethorpe 58 5 380.6 15,259 380.1
Paulding 291 11 168.7 168,667 172.5
Peach 70 3 255.7 27,546 254.1
Pickens 43 3 128.2 32,591 131.9
Pierce 90 3 460.5 19,465 462.4
Pike 50 2 265.1 18,962 263.7
Polk 97 0 223.1 42,613 227.6
Pulaski 39 2 358.0 11,137 350.2
Putnam 88 8 402.1 22,119 397.8
Quitman 11 1 479.5 2,299 478.5
Rabun 15 1 88.3 17,137 87.5
Schley 16 1 303.3 5,257 304.4
Screven 28 2 201.4 13,966 200.5
Seminole 43 2 528.3 8,090 531.5
Spalding 259 17 374.8 66,703 388.3
Stephens 123 2 467.2 25,925 474.4
Tattnall 15 0 59.0 25,286 59.3
Taylor 21 2 263.9 8,020 261.8
Telfair 33 1 210.9 15,860 208.1
Thomas 313 31 704.5 44,451 704.1
Tift 228 15 558.4 40,644 561.0
Toombs 50 4 185.3 26,830 186.4
Towns 22 1 182.8 12,037 182.8
Treutlen 8 0 117.2 6,901 115.9
Troup 260 9 369.2 69,922 371.8
Turner 105 12 1300.2 7,985 1315.0
Twiggs 14 0 173.1 8,120 172.4
Union 39 1 153.9 24,511 159.1
Upson 275 33 1046.5 26,320 1044.8
Walker 96 0 137.9 69,761 137.6
Walton 196 10 204.6 94,593 207.2
Ware 218 14 608.0 35,734 610.1
Washington 73 1 359.6 20,374 358.3
Wayne 17 0 56.7 29,927 56.8
Webster 11 1 431.4 2,607 421.9
Wheeler 9 0 113.8 7,855 114.6
White 94 3 296.0 30,798 305.2
Whitfield 283 7 270.4 104,628 270.5
Wilcox 98 13 1114.9 8,635 1134.9
Wilkes 32 1 319.6 9,777 327.3
Wilkinson 65 4 728.8 8,954 725.9
Worth 210 19 1042.6 20,247 1037.2
         17,137 765     4,948,281 346.3

Abrams Counties:

County Positive Cases Deaths DPH Case Rate 2019 Population Estimates TIGC Case Rate Calculation
Baldwin 330 25 742.8 44,890 735.1
Bibb 435 24 285.9 153,159 284.0
Calhoun 128 5 2026.3 6,189 2068.2
Chatham 448 21 153.3 289,430 154.8
Clarke 232 13 178.8 128,331 180.8
Clay 35 2 1225.9 2,834 1235.0
Clayton 1132 43 371.3 292,256 387.3
Cobb 2795 146 353.5 760,141 367.7
DeKalb 3305 104 416.7 759,297 435.3
Dougherty 1730 140 1924.3 87,956 1966.9
Douglas 504 22 331.8 146,343 344.4
Fulton 4080 199 371.2 1,063,937 383.5
Gwinnett 3198 121 329.3 936,250 341.6
Hancock 191 22 2331.3 8,457 2258.5
Henry 641 19 267.2 234,561 273.3
Jefferson 29 1 189.4 15,362 188.8
Liberty 67 0 108.2 61,435 109.1
Macon 95 6 731.4 12,947 733.8
Muscogee 564 17 294.3 195,769 288.1
Newton 311 10 276.8 111,744 278.3
Randolph 174 19 2576.3 6,778 2567.1
Richmond 534 19 264.0 202,518 263.7
Rockdale 267 9 281.2 90,896 293.7
Stewart 44 0 717.9 6,621 664.6
Sumter 449 41 1527.3 29,524 1520.8
Talbot 35 1 568.4 6,195 565.0
Taliaferro 1 0 61.3 1,537 65.1
Terrell 211 26 2492.0 8,531 2473.3
Warren 18 0 345.5 5,254 342.6
       21,983           1,055     5,669,142 387.8

 

 

 

 

Mar 22

1 Comment

New Kaiser Health News data adds political dimension to Covid-19 crisis

[Note: The third data column in the table about a half-dozen paragraphs down was mislabeled when this was initially posted.  It has now been corrected thanks to a good catch by alert reader Denese Whitney.  Trouble in God’s Country appreciates the help.]

Last Thursday I posted a piece suggesting that Covid-19 might constitute a perfect storm for rural Georgia — that old age and poor health status could combine with a frail healthcare delivery system to put rural areas in particular jeopardy.  Since then a couple of reports have come out that support that view and bring certain healthcare and political realities into sharp focus.

First was a report Saturday from Kaiser Health News (KHN) that documented the number of ICU beds available in virtually every U.S. county and compared those numbers with the population of people 60 and older in each of those counties.  That’s not a perfect measure of an older person’s access to critical care, of course; just because there’s not an ICU bed in your home county doesn’t mean there’s not one in the next county or a nearby city.  But it’s not a bad measure of the magnitude of the healthcare challenge taking shape.

The second was a report in today’s Washington Post.  Philip Bump, one of the nation’s top data journalists, took the KHN data and laid it over county-level data from the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

“Comparing the county-level data from Kaiser Health News to 2016 presidential election data,” Bump wrote,  “we discovered a remarkable bit of data: About 8.3 million people who voted for Trump in 2016 live in counties where there are no ICU beds or no hospitals. That amounts to about 13 percent of the total votes Trump earned in that election, or one out of every eight votes.

“Those counties are also home to about 3.8 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton, a figure which makes up only about 5 percent of her total. Most of the counties voted for Trump by wide margins; he won them by an average of 41 points. He won 10 times as many counties with no ICU beds as did Clinton.”

This afternoon I’ve pulled Kaiser’s Georgia data and combined it with data from Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election and today’s Georgia Department of Public Health report on the number of people in the state who have tested positive for Covid-19.  (As of mid-day today, that number was up to 600 people from 59 counties; 38 of the “positives” were from “unknown” counties.)

Overall, the situation here in Georgia is a microcosm of the national picture Bump found — and if the primary goal in this situation is to try to meet the healthcare needs of the entire state, state politics, as always, hovers not very far in the background and imposes a set of difficult strictures on the process.

In the 2018 gubernatorial election, Brian Kemp, the Republican nominee who ultimately won and is now governor, largely swept rural Georgia, carrying 130 counties.  Of those, 83 don’t have a single ICU bed (indeed, most don’t even have hospitals).  Combined, those counties have a population of 1.7 million, more than 380,000 of whom (22 percent) are over 60.  So far, only 47 of the state’s 600 confirmed Covid-19 cases hail from those counties, but it seems likely those numbers will rise as testing becomes more available in rural areas.

In contrast, the Democratic nominee, Stacey Abrams, dominated the state’s urban areas, which has a much younger population and much more robust healthcare delivery systems.  Twelve of the 29 counties she carried were indeed rural (including a half-dozen southwest Georgia counties that are now in the orbit of the Covid-19 hotspot erupting in and around Albany) and also boast no ICU beds of their own.  But the overwhelming majority of her support came from urban and suburban areas that are home to large healthcare systems with a good number of ICU beds.

This table illustrates the contrast.

Kemp Abrams ICU Bed Table

The 130 counties Kemp carried are home to right at 52 percent of the state’s 60-plus population but have fewer than a third of the state’s ICU beds.

To use Philip Bump’s Washington Post framework, more than a half-million Georgians who voted for Kemp — about 25 percent of his total — reside in counties without a single ICU bed.  That’s true of only about 10 percent of Abrams’s voters.

Again, rural Georgians who fall victim to Covid-19 may well be able to get access to an ICU bed in Metro Atlanta or another major city if they need it, but the current pandemic does seem to put a sharp new focus on a problem that has bedeviled the state’s Republicans since they took power at the turn of the century — how to provide healthcare to rural areas that constitute their political base.

For a decade now, the state’s GOP leaders have steadfastly refused to take advantage of billions of dollars in Medicaid Expansion funds and presided over a steady stream of rural hospital failures.

I’ll try to do more with this over the next couple of days.  For now, here’s a complete list of Georgia counties with all the data discussed in this post.

County # !CU Beds # Covid-19 Cases Confirmed by DPH 3/22/20 Brian Kemp’s % of 2018 General Election Vote Stacey Abrams’s % of the 2018 General Election Vote Population Aged 60+ Percent Population Aged 60+
Appling 3 0 79.7% 19.9% 4208 22.8%
Atkinson 0 0 74.4% 25.2% 1451 17.5%
Bacon 4 0 86.7% 12.7% 2329 20.6%
Baker 0 0 58.2% 41.4% 919 28.3%
Baldwin 12 2 49.5% 49.8% 9287 20.4%
Banks 0 0 89.8% 9.4% 4207 22.9%
Barrow 6 1 73.6% 25.2% 12454 16.6%
Bartow 21 57 76.1% 22.8% 18389 17.9%
Ben Hill 5 0 63.9% 35.6% 3982 23.1%
Berrien 0 0 85.0% 14.4% 4266 22.4%
Bibb 117 1 38.4% 61.0% 31993 20.8%
Bleckley 0 0 78.6% 20.5% 2860 22.4%
Brantley 0 0 91.3% 8.1% 3792 20.6%
Brooks 0 0 61.5% 38.1% 4099 26.2%
Bryan 0 0 70.1% 28.8% 4985 14.3%
Bulloch 24 0 62.8% 36.3% 11463 15.5%
Burke 0 0 50.6% 48.9% 4540 20.0%
Butts 0 1 71.7% 27.7% 4813 20.4%
Calhoun 0 0 42.7% 57.1% 1362 20.9%
Camden 5 0 65.3% 33.6% 8503 16.3%
Candler 6 0 72.4% 27.2% 2476 22.7%
Carroll 18 14 69.8% 29.1% 20423 17.8%
Catoosa 0 0 79.5% 19.3% 14752 22.4%
Charlton 0 1 75.1% 24.4% 2473 19.1%
Chatham 78 4 40.0% 58.9% 56014 19.6%
Chattahoochee 0 0 54.5% 44.7% 645 5.8%
Chattooga 0 1 79.9% 19.4% 5705 22.9%
Cherokee 15 18 72.1% 26.3% 42210 17.9%
Clarke 104 9 28.6% 70.3% 17345 14.0%
Clay 0 0 45.3% 54.0% 937 31.0%
Clayton 34 13 11.8% 87.8% 36959 13.5%
Clinch 0 0 76.1% 23.6% 1466 21.6%
Cobb 119 61 44.6% 54.0% 120689 16.3%
Coffee 10 0 70.7% 28.8% 7860 18.3%
Colquitt 10 0 75.9% 23.5% 8918 19.4%
Columbia 0 3 66.5% 32.5% 26092 18.2%
Cook 0 0 70.9% 28.7% 3527 20.5%
Coweta 19 8 69.7% 29.1% 25269 18.3%
Crawford 0 0 72.9% 26.4% 2798 22.6%
Crisp 16 0 63.0% 36.6% 5331 23.2%
Dade 0 0 82.5% 16.2% 4079 25.1%
Dawson 0 1 85.9% 13.1% 6208 26.5%
Decatur 10 0 60.2% 39.4% 5831 21.6%
DeKalb 168 45 15.7% 83.4% 121505 16.5%
Dodge 6 0 73.9% 25.7% 4726 22.4%
Dooly 0 0 52.7% 47.0% 3522 25.1%
Dougherty 50 48 29.8% 69.8% 18997 20.8%
Douglas 8 4 39.4% 59.8% 22028 15.7%
Early 0 2 55.2% 44.5% 2739 26.3%
Echols 0 0 88.2% 11.0% 681 17.0%
Effingham 0 2 76.9% 22.0% 9061 15.9%
Elbert 4 0 70.0% 29.5% 5092 26.4%
Emanuel 8 0 70.0% 29.5% 4782 21.3%
Evans 0 0 69.4% 30.2% 2260 21.0%
Fannin 5 0 83.0% 16.1% 8800 35.9%
Fayette 37 9 56.0% 42.7% 25277 22.9%
Floyd 65 9 71.1% 27.8% 20941 21.7%
Forsyth 24 4 70.6% 28.0% 33215 15.7%
Franklin 8 0 86.5% 12.7% 5691 25.5%
Fulton 538 108 26.8% 72.2% 159840 15.8%
Gilmer 0 0 83.7% 15.3% 9166 31.0%
Glascock 0 0 91.4% 8.2% 713 23.6%
Glynn 24 3 63.6% 35.6% 20679 24.8%
Gordon 8 4 81.9% 17.1% 10941 19.4%
Grady 4 0 67.3% 32.3% 5593 22.3%
Greene 0 0 65.1% 34.4% 6034 36.1%
Gwinnett 82 27 42.3% 56.5% 122430 13.8%
Habersham 4 0 83.5% 15.6% 10665 24.3%
Hall 85 9 73.4% 25.5% 36793 19.1%
Hancock 0 0 24.7% 75.0% 2435 28.1%
Haralson 0 0 87.7% 11.5% 6357 22.1%
Harris 0 0 74.0% 25.2% 7948 23.9%
Hart 0 0 76.6% 22.6% 7015 27.5%
Heard 0 1 83.2% 16.1% 2692 23.2%
Henry 40 7 42.0% 57.3% 34127 15.7%
Houston 36 1 57.9% 41.1% 25522 17.0%
Irwin 0 0 75.8% 23.9% 2170 23.4%
Jackson 0 0 81.6% 17.4% 12724 19.9%
Jasper 0 0 74.5% 24.9% 3116 22.7%
Jeff Davis 4 0 82.6% 16.9% 3219 21.5%
Jefferson 0 0 47.0% 52.6% 3828 24.0%
Jenkins 0 0 64.7% 35.0% 2049 22.9%
Johnson 0 0 72.5% 27.2% 2334 23.8%
Jones 0 0 67.8% 31.6% 6333 22.2%
Lamar 0 3 69.4% 29.9% 3955 21.6%
Lanier 0 0 71.3% 28.4% 1972 19.0%
Laurens 16 2 65.9% 33.6% 10610 22.4%
Lee 0 16 74.7% 24.8% 4964 17.0%
Liberty 0 0 36.2% 63.1% 7447 12.0%
Lincoln 0 1 69.4% 29.9% 2318 29.8%
Long 0 0 64.7% 34.4% 2398 13.4%
Lowndes 48 8 57.7% 41.6% 17921 15.7%
Lumpkin 0 1 79.2% 19.3% 7478 23.7%
Macon 0 0 36.9% 62.9% 2925 21.4%
Madison 0 0 78.5% 20.7% 6721 23.5%
Marion 0 0 63.9% 35.3% 2190 25.6%
McDuffie 0 0 60.5% 39.0% 4855 22.6%
McIntosh 0 0 59.5% 40.0% 4475 31.8%
Meriwether 0 0 58.9% 40.4% 5261 24.9%
Miller 0 1 77.9% 21.6% 1561 26.5%
Mitchell 0 0 56.2% 43.5% 4919 21.8%
Monroe 0 1 71.9% 27.2% 6594 24.6%
Montgomery 0 0 76.1% 23.3% 1891 21.1%
Morgan 0 0 71.2% 28.0% 4678 26.0%
Murray 0 0 85.8% 13.4% 7520 19.1%
Muscogee 61 2 38.6% 60.7% 34483 17.4%
Newton 10 4 45.1% 54.3% 18455 17.6%
Oconee 0 1 69.8% 29.0% 7602 21.1%
Oglethorpe 0 0 70.5% 28.4% 3441 23.5%
Paulding 8 4 66.6% 32.5% 21365 14.0%
Peach 0 3 52.2% 47.3% 5201 19.2%
Pickens 6 2 84.8% 14.2% 8464 27.9%
Pierce 0 0 88.9% 10.7% 4228 22.1%
Pike 0 0 85.7% 13.6% 3658 20.4%
Polk 0 4 79.1% 20.1% 8705 21.0%
Pulaski 6 0 69.8% 29.8% 2806 24.6%
Putnam 0 0 71.9% 27.5% 6275 29.3%
Quitman 0 0 55.5% 43.6% 913 42.7%
Rabun 0 0 80.0% 18.8% 5564 34.0%
Randolph 0 1 45.1% 54.4% 2258 31.3%
Richmond 264 10 31.5% 67.7% 38152 18.9%
Rockdale 16 2 32.0% 67.4% 17124 19.4%
Schley 0 0 81.0% 18.3% 1100 21.3%
Screven 0 0 60.4% 39.4% 3450 24.6%
Seminole 0 0 66.7% 32.8% 2541 29.7%
Spalding 22 2 61.2% 37.9% 14777 23.0%
Stephens 6 0 80.7% 18.6% 6327 24.7%
Stewart 0 0 41.8% 58.0% 1209 20.7%
Sumter 10 2 48.8% 50.7% 6539 21.3%
Talbot 0 0 39.5% 59.8% 2045 31.8%
Taliaferro 0 0 38.1% 61.6% 511 27.7%
Tattnall 0 0 76.3% 23.1% 4769 18.8%
Taylor 0 0 62.9% 36.5% 2020 24.4%
Telfair 0 0 66.8% 32.8% 3802 23.3%
Terrell 0 2 45.7% 53.9% 2148 23.9%
Thomas 35 0 61.2% 38.3% 10319 23.0%
Tift 20 2 69.7% 29.7% 8091 20.0%
Toombs 8 0 74.8% 24.8% 5815 21.4%
Towns 0 0 81.7% 17.4% 4566 40.9%
Treutlen 0 0 68.9% 30.8% 1666 24.7%
Troup 20 4 60.9% 38.4% 13380 19.3%
Turner 0 1 63.0% 36.6% 2004 24.9%
Twiggs 0 1 52.7% 46.8% 2395 28.8%
Union 5 0 83.4% 15.6% 8856 39.8%
Upson 28 0 66.8% 32.6% 6294 24.0%
Walker 0 0 81.0% 17.9% 16583 24.2%
Walton 7 0 76.9% 22.4% 17821 20.1%
Ware 22 0 71.7% 27.8% 7974 22.3%
Warren 0 0 46.6% 53.1% 1586 29.3%
Washington 0 0 50.6% 49.1% 4483 21.9%
Wayne 12 0 80.2% 19.1% 6149 20.6%
Webster 0 0 59.9% 40.0% 671 25.5%
Wheeler 0 0 71.1% 28.7% 1550 19.5%
White 0 0 84.5% 14.4% 7553 26.5%
Whitfield 34 2 72.3% 26.8% 18625 17.9%
Wilcox 0 0 73.3% 26.5% 1960 22.0%
Wilkes 0 0 59.0% 40.4% 2863 28.9%
Wilkinson 0 0 55.6% 44.0% 2285 25.0%
Worth 0 2 75.4% 24.1% 5131 24.7%
Totals 2508 562     1,863,154 18.3%

 

 

 

 

Nov 22

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 around to taking a deeper dive into past election results and can report a couple of things.

The first thing I can report is that the Georgia Republican Party’s rural strategy is now pretty clear.  Basically, they’re trying to run off all the Democrats.

The second thing I can report is that they’re doing a damn fine job of it.

I am only about half-joking.  One 2018 factoid that I don’t think got nearly enough attention is that Governor Brian Kemp, then the Republican nominee, cracked 90 percent in two rural counties, Glascock (in east-central Georgia, gave him 91.4 percent) and Brantley (deep southeast Georgia, 91.3 percent).  That was a first, at least in modern political history.  Kemp topped 80 percent in 27 more counties.

Even Donald Trump didn’t do that well; in 2016, he piled up 80 percent vote totals in 24 counties but never got into that 90 percent stratosphere anywhere.  Altogether, Kemp won 76 counties with more than 70 percent of the vote; you have to wonder if he wasn’t disappointed with the 36 counties he won with a relatively meager 60 and 70 percent, not to mention the 18 laggard counties that couldn’t deliver more than 50-something percent.

This pattern isn’t exclusively Republican, of course.  Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams broke 80 percent in Clayton and DeKalb counties and got into the 70s in three more counties, and the fact that once reliably red suburban counties are now trending blue has been heavily reported and well documented.  Indeed, as I was finishing up this research, Jay Bookman went up at the Georgia Recorder with an excellent piece documenting the “velocity” with which heavily populated urban and suburban counties are flipping from red to blue.  It’s a good companion to this piece.

It’s worth taking a minute, though, to recognize how and why all this is a big deal.  Up until 1990, Democratic landslides were foregone conclusions and anything less than a 25-point win was a little embarrassing.  But Republicans were clawing their way to relevance and in the 28 years since then every gubernatorial election but one has been decided by 10 points or less; the only real blowout was Governor Sonny Perdue’s 19-point thrashing of Lt. Governor Mark Taylor in 2006.

But that rough statewide equilibrium has masked tectonic shifts taking place beneath the surface.   First of all, Georgia’s Democrats and Republicans have basically swapped geographic territory over the past three decades.  In 1990, the state’s popular Democratic lieutenant governor, Zell Miller, carried 141 counties and posted a relatively modest 8.3-point win over Johnny Isakson, at the time a suburban Republican state senator.  In 2018, Republican Kemp carried 130 counties in his squeaker over Democrat Abrams, the party’s first female and African-American nominee.  Here’s what the raw 1990 and 2018 maps looked like.

 

That’s only part of the story, however, and it is a bit deceptive.  The way those Democratic and Republican voting blocs are assembled has changed radically over the past three decades – and those changes bring the state’s political divide into even sharper relief.

In 1990, Miller beat Isakson 52.9%-to-44.5%, and that spread was generally reflective of what you found around the state.  Fifty-three of the state’s 159 counties were decided in that middling 55%-to-45% range.  Another 50 counties were carried with less than 60 percent of the vote.  In other words, the vast majority of the state’s counties were fairly competitive.

Map the 1990 results based on the extent to which each party carried a county and you get paler shades of blue and red (left).  1990 Shaded MapYou even get some nearly colorless counties; Miller led in six counties with pluralities in the high 40s (Coweta County tipped his way by two votes out of nearly 12,000 cast).  Isakson’s best performance was 61.8 percent, in his home Cobb County.  Miller’s best showing was 75.1 percent in Chattahoochee County, one of seven rural counties where he topped 70 percent.

Last year was very different.  The closest gubernatorial race at least in modern history – Kemp’s 1.4 percent win over Abrams – was forged on the most divided and hyper-partisan political terrain in the state’s history.  Only 15 counties were decided with less than 55 percent of the vote, and only 19 more were won with less than 60 percent.

Put another way, in 1990, 60 percent was the ceiling in 103 of the state’s 159 counties – the most either Miller or Isakson got in any of those counties.  In 2018, 60 percent was the floor in 105 counties – the least either Kemp or Abrams got.  2018 Shade MapThe pastels that were so prevalent in 1990 were in shorter supply last year, especially the reds (right).

As one illustration of the magnitude of the rural shift, Miller’s native Towns County gave him 73.5 percent of its vote in 1990; last year, it went 81.7 percent for Kemp.

The real question in all this is, of course, so what?  How do the shifts and balkanization of the state’s political geography affect policy-making and legislating, especially as it relates to the problems of rural Georgia?  I won’t pretend to know, but my hunch is we’re headed for a reckoning.

For now, both the Georgia House of Representatives and State Senate are still safely in Republican hands, and they can be expected to advance and defend rural interests (even at the expense of urban taxpayers).

But the 2020 Census and the subsequent reapportionment will inevitably change that.  All the mischief that is likely to occur both in counting the bodies and redrawing the lines won’t be able to completely defy the gravitational pull of Metro Atlanta and Georgia’s other urban communities.  Rural Georgia will lose seats, and that will have political and policy consequences.

Exactly what they will be remains to be seen.  The one certain thing is that political common ground is, literally, getting harder and harder to find.

 

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