How Ossoff won over Trump voters in Valdosta, Tifton and Toccoa
Three Republican mayors in small-town Georgia did something this summer that ought to interest anyone wondering where this state is heading.
Scott James Matheson of Valdosta, Julie Smith of Tifton and Gail Fry of Toccoa, towns about as red as Georgia gets, endorsed Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff over his Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, their own party’s nominee. Ideology had nothing to do with it.
Smith said the senator “tracks me down.” Fry said he calls and asks, “What do you need?” Smith said, “The proof is in the pudding.” His office had delivered for their towns, and they said so in public.
I am a clinical psychologist in Atlanta, and I have spent more than 40 years listening to people describe the moment they decide to trust someone.
It rarely involves an argument. What they say sounds like this: the person showed up, remembered what I said, came back and understood me. Trust follows attention. The mayors described that exact relationship in the more convincing language of small-town government.
Taking notice and then acting is key
Georgia has been running an experiment the rest of the country only talks about. It sent a Republican to the Governor’s Mansion and a Democrat to the Senate in the same cycle.
Many Georgians vote for the person rather than the letter after the name. These voters know what they are doing. They are auditioning candidates for a job, and the job description reads: Notice me and act on what you notice.
Donald Trump won that audition in the 2016 presidential election and has kept the part, in Tifton as much as anywhere. Nobody fooled the people who backed him, whatever Atlanta says about them.
Many had gone years without a public figure who appeared to know they existed, and then someone said, loudly and often, that they were the whole point. They matter. Recognition like that does not come loose because someone proves the giver unworthy. If it did, my profession would be much easier.
The question this November, then, is not whether Democrats can pry voters from Trump by discrediting him. Ten years of effort have answered that. It is whether anyone can offer the same recognition in a more trustworthy form.
Ossoff’s answer has been to reach out and keep doing so. On the night he won his seat, he told Georgians who had voted against him that he would represent them anyway.
Politicians say that. Rarer is a record of following through in places that will never throw the candidate a parade: $2 million for Valdosta’s transit system, hurricane calls to South Georgia mayors, money for Tift Regional Medical Center, casework in counties the campaign will lose by 30 percentage points. None of it goes viral. The people it touches notice, and they are the only ones who count.
Then there is how he talks about voters. At an Atlanta rally this month, he called Trump “a symptom of something,” what rises when working people go too long without an advocate. That sentence neither scolds Trump voters nor flatters them. He treated their grievance as a signal worth reading rather than a character flaw, as a good clinician treats any symptom. Former U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, a conservative Republican, endorsed him for his character. The mayors endorsed him for his office. Both endorsements say the same thing. He paid attention and did not condescend.
Could personal attacks help the Republican candidate?
The hard part has already started. On Sept. 13, in Athens, before a packed Georgia Theatre, Ossoff called Collins a “crumbling little bigot” and a “scandal pinata.” The crowd loved it. The campaign will call it energy.
Voters in Valdosta and Tifton will recognize the tone they have heard from Atlanta for decades and assume it targets them. Collins may deserve every word. That is beside the point. Recognition with one hand and mockery with the other cancel each other out.
The stakes showed up the same week. On Sept. 14, Gov. Brian Kemp, the chief beneficiary of Georgia’s split tickets, endorsed Collins. Four days later, a Quantus Insights poll put Ossoff ahead by four points statewide and by 17 in the Atlanta media market, with Collins ahead in rural Georgia by 28. The senator’s margin now depends on how many small-town Republicans follow their mayors instead of their governor.
The three mayors did not endorse a Democrat because they stopped being Republicans. They endorsed a person who showed up. Whether that instinct spreads beyond three Georgia towns is the most interesting question in the state this fall, and Georgia, as usual, will answer it before the rest of the country has finished arguing.
John R. Paddock, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in Atlanta and a faculty member of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute and the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Washington, D.C.
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