On the road again, looking for what’s driving Georgia’s politics

Public safety, in particular, was a challenge all across the state. From the Blue Ridge Mountains to Athens, Macon and beyond, a combination of poverty, mental illness and pockets of systemic crime combined to give mayors the hardest problem they had ever tried to solve. In many cases, guns made it worse.

The economy was the other story in Georgia that summer, for better and worse. While some places like Savannah and Pooler were booming, thanks to the massive amount of business coming out of the Georgia ports, smaller Georgia towns further off the interstates were struggling to stay alive. When people moved away from a place like Talbotton, so did businesses. When the people and businesses left, so did nearby hospitals and grocery stores. The downward spiral is hard to stop, but that didn’t mean the mayors weren’t trying.

My biggest takeaway in the summer of 2021 was that the further away from partisan politics a place seemed to be, the better it seemed to work.

Credit: Credit Patricia Murphy

Credit: Credit Patricia Murphy

By the summer of 2023, Gov. Brian Kemp had just won a huge reelection and Republicans had won every statewide contest except for Raphael Warnock’s U.S. Senate seat. The state that Democrats hoped would be theirs was far from it. That summer, too, President Donald Trump was under grand jury investigation in Fulton County for election interference and would soon be booked and fingerprinted at the Fulton County jail.

But far away from the national headlines in Atlanta, another story was playing out around the state, again focused on the economy. The governor had put manufacturing growth at the top of his priority list for his second term and the results were everywhere you looked. In Metter, about 45 miles from Hyundai’s $6.5 billion electric vehicle plant in southeast Georgia, Mayor Ed Boyd and his economic development team were busy preparing for the growth they hoped would come to their town, too.

Credit: Patricia Murphy, AJC

Credit: Patricia Murphy, AJC

What could it mean for schools? Home prices? Infrastructure and more?

“If you’re not going forward, you’re going back,” Boyd told me during lunch at Jomax Barbecue. The town had also become the home of an agribusiness incubator, helping local small businesses get off the ground. The aim — that they would become big businesses and plant their roots there.

In Madison and Social Circle, far away from Metter and about 60 miles east of Atlanta, leaders were focused on the state’s other major manufacturing win, the long-ago announced $5 billion Rivian EV plant, slated to be built in nearby Rutledge. Even though the project is still stalled in the planning stages, they were hopeful for what it could mean for the local economy.

“My motto for my campaigns was ‘Let’s keep Madison moving,’” three-term Madison Mayor Fred Perriman told me then. “Sometimes we get older, we reach retirement age, we forget about those who are still struggling and just trying to make a living,” he said. With the proper training and a job at Rivian, he said, young people in the area “could be set for life.”

No matter where you are in the state, with growth comes change, and that change is not always welcome by the people who have never known their hometowns any other way.

On a trip to Forsyth County in 2023, horse fields and hay barns were giving way to “doggy day cares” and upscale townhomes. And the faces in Forsyth were changing as fast as the landscape. The same county that was the site of a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1987 had now become the home of the state’s fastest growing Asian population, at 20% of the residents and counting.

Credit: Patricia Murphy

Credit: Patricia Murphy

But while pundits assumed the county’s more diverse population would also mean more Democratic voters, Trump actually won 6,000 more votes in Forsyth in 2024 than he did in 2020. Like nearly every place in the state, the economy trumped everything in Forsyth, so to speak. But the pace of change was causing stress, too. Trump, they said, should be president again.

For this year’s Georgia politics road trip, I’ll bring a few questions I hope to have answered — but no particular agenda.

Are voters getting what they wanted when they put Trump back in the White House? How are the proposals coming out of Washington to cut Medicaid and SNAP benefits being received? Does it change a state to change the federal government so profoundly? What else is on Georgians’ minds?

I’ll report back from where I go. But in the meantime, all food, lodging and local legend recommendations from the AJC’s intrepid readers are welcome. Send them my way at patricia.murphy@ajc.com.

And I’ll see you down the road.