Downtown Atlanta boarded up when it became clear that Georgia could decide the fate of Donald Trump by just a few thousands votes one way or the other.
The city worried that the president might unleash his well-armed supporters against an unfavourable result or that Trump’s opponents might turn out in protest if Georgia’s Republican establishment got up to its old shenanigans of fixing elections.
But as the counting dragged on, the streets stayed quieter than usual, although coronavirus had already taken its toll on city life. When the results finally began to put Joe Biden in the lead in Georgia, his supporters held off on the celebrations. This was the wrong year to tempt fate.
But there was a lot of quiet satisfaction that a state whose most significant role in presidential elections until now was as the home of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, might prove instrumental in the toppling of the US president.
“I’m glad I voted. Didn’t last time but we needed rid of that guy. I’m proud of Georgia!” said Martin Williams, on his way to work at a fast food restaurant an otherwise empty city street early Saturday morning.
That is a widely held sentiment among Trump’s opponents who sometimes cast his defeat – although a recount was announced on Friday – in terms of a sweet revenge in a state he won by five points in 2016.
After trailing for days in the Georgia count, Biden was finally tipped into winning territory by votes from Clayton County, represented in Congress for years by the civil rights titan John Lewis, a fierce critic of Trump who died in July.
“I love the idea that Clayton County could put Biden over in GA. That’s John Lewis’ district. He would do one of his trademark happy dances in heaven. Symmetry,” former Senator Claire McCaskill tweeted.
Ben Crump, the lawyer who represents the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other African Americans killed by police, tweeted a reference to Lewis’s mantra of causing “good trouble” in the fight for rights.
“Could this be John Lewis looking down and giving Trump ‘Good Trouble’? This is ALL thanks to YOU, the Black vote, for flipping this historically red state,” he wrote.
There is little doubt that the black vote was instrumental in deciding the outcome in a state with a long history of subverting the voting rights of African Americans and where the Confederate battle flag still decorates many rural porches.
If any one person can be credited with delivering the blow against Trump it is Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for state governor who took her revenge on the Republican establishment for, as many in Georgia see it, stealing that election. In response, she mobilised a cadre of voters to make sure it couldn’t happen again, and that has paid off for Biden.
Abrams would have become the first black female governor in the US had she been elected two years ago. She lost by just 55,000 votes and has never conceded that race, saying an “erosion of our democracy” deprived supporters of their right to vote.
Her opponent, Brian Kemp, used his position as Georgia’s secretary of state to remove more than 300,000 people from the voters roll, many on the grounds that they had not voted in three years in the kind of voter suppression that has become a hallmark of some Republican-run states. Kemp also refused to recuse himself from overseeing the election he was running in.
“More than 200 years into Georgia’s democratic experiment, the state failed its voters,” Abrams said after the election. “Eight years of systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment and incompetence had its desired effect on the electoral process in Georgia.”
Abrams, who Biden considered as his vice-presidential running mate, responded by building on her work to register new voters and fight voter suppression through a network of groups that raised tens of millions of dollars.
She recognised the shifting demographics of Georgia and focused part of her campaign on what were once almost exclusively white suburbs of cities such as Atlanta but are now home to a black middle class that has grown significantly in recent years.
Supporters credit Abrams with generating hundreds of thousands of new voter registrations, particularly among minorities and those who rarely went to the polls – plenty more than the few thousand Biden now leads by in Georgia.
One of Abrams’ groups, Fair Fight Action, sued in a federal court to stop Republicans purging voters, winning the reinstatement of 22,000 people to the rolls.
“I, for one, feel she would be our governor if it were not for the rampant voter suppression tactics,” Nikema Williams, the state’s Democratic party chair, told the New York Times. “The work that she did in organising people on the ground, in coalition with other progressive organisations, was critical to building the infrastructure in this state.”
On Tuesday, that organising helped elect Williams to the Congressional seat previously held by Lewis. It also paid off for Biden.
Abrams tweeted her delight at the result, saying: “My heart is full.”
Recent Comments