Opinion | The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher. - The New York Times

"The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher.
By Joseph CrespinoNov. 20, 2019, 6:00 a.m. ET
With tonight’s presidential primary debate, Georgia Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief. Finally, they are saying, the national party is recognizing that demographics really are destiny, that Georgia can and should be a central part of any plan to win back the White House and the Senate.
For nearly two decades now, the demographic trendline in Georgia has been favorable to Democrats. Particularly compared with aging, white, Midwestern states like Michigan and Ohio, Georgia is younger, more diverse and more economically dynamic, with educated, progressive voters moving to the state each year.
The 2016 election was a great indicator. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by eight points in Ohio but only five in Georgia. Imagine what the results would have been, Georgia Democrats say, if the national party had committed more resources to the state. The 2018 election cycle only heightened expectations. Stacey Abrams, who waged a historic campaign as the first African-American woman to win a major party’s nomination for governor, came within about 55,000 votes of defeating her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, whose campaign was historic in its own way. Not since the days of Eugene Talmadge or Lester Maddox had a candidate for governor conducted such a polarizing, divisive campaign.
Even more exciting was the fact that in 2018 Democrats moved beyond close calls to actual victory. Lucy McBath defeated an experienced Republican candidate in the Sixth Congressional District, which included areas that have traditionally been among Atlanta’s wealthiest, most reliably Republican suburbs. Ms. McBath’s tragic personal history as the mother of a young man killed by gun violence dramatized the problem of gun control, the issue that, perhaps more than any other, puts the Republican Party outside the mainstream of American voters.
In Georgia, the stakes of the 2020 election could not be higher. Because of the announced resignation of Senator Johnny Isakson for health reasons, both United States Senate seats will be contested.
Yet turning Georgia blue in 2020 remains an uphill battle. That’s because, outside of metro Atlanta and other urban areas like Savannah, Georgia remains a deeply conservative state. The defenders of the demographics-are-destiny thesis should remember that destiny is shaped by history, too.
In many ways, American politics today resemble an earlier era in Southern history, when candidates who only a few years before their election had been dismissed as jokes or nobodies stoked reactionary impulses to win the highest office in the state. That’s what happened in Georgia in 1966 when Lester Maddox, a folksy restaurateur and longtime failed candidate, was elected governor. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, forcing the desegregation of public accommodations in the South, Maddox leapt to public prominence by wielding an ax handle to chase away African-Americans who attempted to eat at his restaurant. He attracted the same voters that George Wallace won in neighboring Alabama — white Southerners embittered by social and political changes that they felt were being forced upon them by sanctimonious, out-of-touch elites."
For several years now, journalists and historians have compared Mr. Trump to George Wallace, but Wallace is just the tip of an iceberg. There is a much deeper tradition of demagogy in American politics — it runs like a bright line through the history of the South — to which Mr. Trump is heir. In Georgia, before Lester Maddox, there was Herman Talmadge, who led the forces of racist reaction following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Talmadge supporters in the Georgia legislature altered the state flag to include the old Confederate battle flag as a symbol of Georgia’s defiance of the federal government. Before Herman there was his father, Eugene, a man who stoked some of the pride and a lot of the prejudices of white Georgians to advance his own political interests. In the midst of the Great Depression, when Georgia was among the poorest states in the nation, Eugene tried to build a national campaign by vilifying Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was the best and only hope that poor Georgians had to pull themselves out of an entrenched poverty that had bedeviled the state and region since the end of the Civil War.
History reminds us that, as repugnant as they are to their political opponents, demagogues like Mr. Trump are not easily defeated. In Georgia, the more that Atlanta’s newspaper editors and influential citizens castigated Eugene Talmadge as corrupt, uncouth and dangerous, the deeper his rural supporters dug in their heels. Ultimately, it wasn’t any moral reckoning that ended political machines like the Talmadges’; it was structural change, when the Supreme Court overturned Georgia’s county unit system, which had given disproportionate power to rural interests.
Even history has its limits. That’s because, as any historian will tell you, there’s no such thing as destiny. The future is merely what all of us make of it. That is why Wednesday night’s debate, and all of the Democratic primary and general elections to follow, is so important. In the Massive Resistance era, Georgia and the rest of the South eventually turned to honest, competent, responsible leaders. Lester Maddox was followed in office by Jimmy Carter, who, despite being the son of a loyal Gene Talmadge man, took office with an Inaugural Address declaring that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” He brought Georgians together across racial lines, and the state survived its brush with political demagogy. Whether or not Americans today will survive theirs remains unclear.

Joseph Crespino (@CrespinoJoe) is a history professor at Emory University and the author of, most recently, “Atticus Finch: The Biography — Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon.”

Opinion | The Democrats Are in Georgia. The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher. - The New York Times: