Cultivating the rural vote in Georgia

Sam Gringlas reports from Georgia for NPR, "Georgia's rural Black voters helped propel Democrats before. Will they do it again?"  Some salient excerpts are below:  

Until recently, a statewide candidate spending significant time in this thinly-populated, substantially Black, southwest corner of Georgia was virtually unheard of.

For years, Democrats failed to win statewide in Georgia. The ground began to shift about four years ago when Stacey Abrams made her first bid for governor.

"Atlanta cannot live without Albany, and Albany cannot live without the investments that come from Atlanta," Abrams said in 2017, launching her campaign, not in Atlanta, but in Albany. "We need to talk to those forgotten voters, the ones who are rarely talked about. I am running for governor because we need a governor who comes from a town like Albany. Where we begin does not dictate what we become."

Instead of bending over backward to court more conservative voters, Abrams focused on activating non-voters and irregular voters, especially people of color in overlooked parts of the state. 

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More than 50,000 people have registered in Southwest Georgia since 2018. The majority are non-white, the New Georgia Project says.

"Look, for the most part, the rural characterization is true," says Dante Chinni, a researcher with the American Communities Project who has studied rural African American counties in the South. "Rural America tends to vote for Trump, tends to be Republican. But when you divide the vote further, you see these subtleties and nuances."

Nearly a quarter of rural Americans were people of color in 2020, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. And while the country's rural population is shrinking overall, its diversity is growing.

Still, the biggest shifts from red to blue in 2020 were in the suburbs of metro Atlanta, where newcomers have poured in from out of state and where then-President Donald Trump repelled many moderate voters.

And even while Democrats in racially diverse rural communities in the South turned out more voters in the 2020 presidential election than in 2016, turnout for Trump soared even more in these same counties, driven by white, rural voters.

Gringlas quotes Professor Andra Gillespie, who teaches political science at Emory University in Atlanta.  

This is a both/and strategy. I think some people want to use it as an either/or.  

Even though Democrats expect to lose in rural parts of the state, they can't underperform there. Because if they underperform there, they end up losing the election.

The next part of the story focuses on some recent rural challenges, in particular the closure of a nearby hospital in Cuthbert, which is more truly rural than Albany, which is a regional center. 

Prior posts about Albany, Georgia are here and here; both are pandemic focused.