Georgia's shifting politics force GOP to look beyond Atlanta

Georgia’s Republican Party once relied on votes in Atlanta’s close-in suburbs, but today the GOP increasingly relies on the mountains of north Georgia for its votes

When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made one of his first general election campaign swings in August, he went straight to the modern heartland of the state’s Republican Party.

It wasn’t Buckhead, the glitzy Atlanta neighborhood where Kemp lives in a governor’s mansion dwarfed by other nearby estates. And it wasn’t suburban Cobb County, once the bastion of Newt Gingrich.

Instead, Kemp kept going north, deep into the Georgia mountains that have become one of the most Republican areas in the country over the last three decades. He stopped at a gas station turned coffee shop in Toccoa to urge people “turn out an even bigger vote here in this county and in northeast Georgia than we’ve ever seen before.”

“Ask your kids, your grandkids, your friend’s kid, are they registered to vote?” Kemp told attendees. “If they’re eligible, and they’re not, we got to get them registered, and we’ve got to go tell them to pull it for the home team.”

The emphasis on this rural region represents a notable shift in the GOP’s strategy in Georgia. The party grew into a powerhouse in Georgia once it began combining a strong performance in the Atlanta suburbs with growing dominance in rural areas. But that coalition has frayed in recent years as voters in the booming Atlanta region rejected the GOP under former President Donald Trump, turning this onetime Republican stronghold into the South’s premier swing state.

A 41-county region, including some distant Atlanta suburbs encroaching into north Georgia, now has as many GOP voters as the core of metro Atlanta, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. Those changing dynamics have intensified pressure on Kemp to maintain — or strengthen — his support in rural mountainous communities like Toccoa to offset losses closer to the capital city.

Kemp won the governor’s office in 2018 by defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams by just 1.4 percentage points. As the two wage a rematch for the job this year, early summer polling found a close race, with some suggesting Kemp has a narrow advantage.

But his reliance on voters like those in Toccoa is driving the party further to the right.

In a diversifying state, north Georgia is overwhelmingly white. While Democrats attack and Republicans fret over abortion restrictions in the suburbs, there’s little public wavering in the mountains. Voters love guns so much that they cut out the middleman and chose gun dealer Andrew Clyde as one of north Georgia’s two very Trumpy members of Congress. The other member? Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“It reflects a lot of the country right now, in the sense that it’s very populist, very close to the vest, very isolated in the sense of distrust of government, very strong-willed, mountain Appalachian-type individuals that are very self-sufficient,” said former Rep. Doug Collins, the Republican who preceded Clyde in representing northeast Georgia’s 9th Congressional District.

Kathy Petrella, a Clarkesville retiree who was visiting the state Department of Driver Services in early September in Toccoa, said she’s a “true blue conservative.”

“It means I don’t believe in the government telling me anything I have to do, except law and order,” said Petrella, who cites her Christian faith as an important anchor of her political affiliation and fears a decline into “communism.”

Lee MacAulay of the north Georgia town of Cleveland, also visiting Toccoa, said she believes Trump won the 2020 election and calls President Joe Biden “a ridiculous joke” and “an idiot.”

“I was a Trumper,” MacAulay said. “I am a Trumper.”

Jay Doss, a Toccoa lawyer, said he feels “working-class people are benefited more by the conservative party” and that “I just feel that less government is better for everybody.”

There was once another conservative tradition in north Georgia — in the Democratic Party. While there were always some Republicans, a legacy of white mountaineers who backed the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War, they won few elections.

“It used to be slap Democrat. If you ran Republican, you could not get elected. Now, if you run Democrat, you ain’t got a chance much of getting elected,” said Stephens County Commissioner Dennis Bell, a Republican who owns Currahee Station, the coffee shop where Kemp campaigned in Toccoa.

That Democratic lineage, nourished by the 1930s-era New Deal, produced former Gov. Zell Miller, a proud son of the mountains and titan of Georgia Democratic politics a generation ago.

Miller rode high in the 1990s as a Democrat who combatted crime and overhauled welfare, while creating lottery-funded college scholarships. Miller even squeaked out a reelection victory in the 1994 “Republican Revolution” that vaulted Gingrich to U.S. House speaker.

That year, Miller actually lost his home region to Republican Guy Millner, a self-financed millionaire businessman. But Miller lost by fewer than 4,000 votes across north Georgia, and Millner’s strength in suburban Atlanta wasn’t enough, leaving the Republican 32,000 votes short statewide.

By 2004, as a U.S. senator, Miller was giving the keynote speech at the Republican National Convention that renominated George W. Bush. By then, Miller had written “A National Party No More,” a book that blamed his own party for abandoning Southern conservative Democrats.

“Obviously, southerners believe the national Democratic Party does not share their values,” Miller wrote in the 2003 book. “They do not trust the national party with their money or the security of the country.”

North Georgia was 19% of Millner’s vote in 1994. It was 26% of Kemp’s vote in 2018. Some of that is due to population growth, but reflects a partisan shift to Republicans. Millner won less than 51% of the vote in the region. Kemp won almost 72%.

Democrats, enduring steep decline, grew demoralized. June Krise, who then chaired the Democratic Party in north Georgia’s White County, remembers crying when the county probate judge, clerk of court and sheriff all switched to run as Republicans.

“`If we don’t switch, we will lose because the Republicans are going to run somebody against us,'” Krise remembers the men telling her. “And guess why they were going to lose. Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee for president.”

Republicans say formerly Democratic voters gravitated to their party because of cultural issues, but those who study the electorate note white voters are much more likely to be Republican, and Appalachia made a hard turn against Obama, the nation’s first Black president.

“The Republican Party has now started organizing itself, I think, to be more in line with the white people who are there — more rural, less urban-interested. even less suburban-interested, in terms of the state party,” Fraga said. “And that’s looks more like North Georgia in a lot of ways.”

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