I have a question for the Democratic Party of Georgia.
Why should any prospective donor, large or small, contribute a single dime – nay, even a penny – to this party?
I write this, by the way, as somebody who has not voted for a Republican since the late Mike Egan was my state senator back in the late 1990s.
I also write this is as someone who believes the blood of Apalachee High School and the pregnant women who are dying in Georgia from lack of medical care is on the hands of Governor Brian Kemp and every Republican in the Georgia General Assembly. But I also think that blood is on the hands of a Democratic Party that lacks the basic competence to turn the GOP’s abhorrent gun and abortion policies into winning political issues – and, even more fundamentally, to get their voters to the polls over those and other issues.
There can be no greater political irony than this: The state that produced Martin Luther King Jr., Andy Young, John Lewis and countless other important civil rights leaders still cannot get Blacks to vote in elections that should have been imminently winnable for the Democrats.
A couple of illustrations: First, Georgia has 66 counties whose populations are at least 70% White. Those counties are for the most part sparsely populated rural counties, but also include substantial fast-growing counties like Cherokee, Forsyth, Hall, Coweta and Carroll counties, among others. All these overwhelmingly White counties are home to 2.3 million registered voters, and 69.0% of them turned out in last month’s presidential election. Former president and now president-elect Donald J. Trump got 73.6% of those votes.
Only two counties – Clayton and Dougherty – are at least 70% Black. Not surprisingly, they went 80% for Vice President Kamala Harris. But their combined voter turnout rate averaged only 51.6% — a full 17.4 points lower than the turnout in the overwhelmingly White counties. If Clayton and Dougherty had voted at the same 69% rate averaged by the largely White counties, they would have generated nearly 50,000 more votes – and probably 40,000 of those would have gone to Harris.
Another example. Compare Georgia’s regional urban counties with their white flight neighbors. This table tells the story. In each of the groupings, the county listed first is the major urban (and more heavily Black county): Chatham (Savannah), Dougherty (Albany), Clarke (Athens) and Richmond (Augusta). The county or counties shown immediately below them are neighboring counties that have emerged, to varying degrees, as “white flight” counties.
The most stunning example is the last one. Richmond County, home to Augusta, is one of the largest urban counties outside Metro Atlanta. Columbia County began developing decades ago as Richmond’s white flight county, but it still has about 40,000 fewer residents and roughly 27,000 fewer registered voters. Despite that, Columbia County actually sent more voters to the polls than Richmond: 86,605 versus 84,394.
And, of course, 70%White Columbia went heavily for Trump. That’s the story of this election. For all the talk about the Democrats’ vaunted ground game and GOTV machinery, Black voters sat home and passed on a chance to put a woman of color in the Oval Office.
Which brings me to a brief digression and back to my question about why anybody would donate money to the Democratic Party. In my younger days as a public relations manager, I did a good bit of work in the field of financial and investor communication. One thing you learn in that line of work is that prospective investors demand confidence in a company’s management. They may love a product, but if they don’t think the company’s management knows what it’s doing, they’ll put their money somewhere else.
Politics isn’t that different. Voters may feel good about certain candidates or policies, but woe be unto a party’s leaders if the voters doubt their ability to win elections. That, methinks, is where the Democratic Party of Georgia finds itself today.
And woe be unto them.
