Almost as soon as I took over the Political Insider column from my predecessor, Jim Galloway, in 2020, I knew I would change the name of the column at some point.
To me, Jim was the original and only “Political Insider,” the man so steeped in Georgia politics and history he often knew more than the lawmakers and politicos he was covering. If a state representatuve proposed a new bridge over a river, Jim would not only know when the original bridge had been built, but also who owned the property on either side, which state senator sold the timber to build it, and which judge had been bribed to make it happen the first time around.
But the column I have written since taking over from Jim has been as much about today’s political outsiders as political insiders — the Georgians who will never be on a ballot but are just as much a part of the process as the people getting elected.
For every innovative idea or hairbrained pitch in Georgia politics, there are real people on the other end who stand to be affected by them. Those same people also have the power to turn around and vote their leaders in or out in Georgia’s next elections, if they’re engaged in the system and willing to do something about it.
Some of my favorite columns have been about the Georgians on the other side of the ideas, for better or worse.
One from the “worse” category has to be the move in 2022 from a group of wealthy Atlanta residents to split the Buckhead neighborhood from the city to create a “city of Buckhead.” Not only were there never details about what would happen to the schools and parks in Buckhead, almost immediately I heard from the residents of the long-established city of Buckhead about 60 miles east of Atlanta that they’d had the name since the early 1800’s.
“They’re trying to take our name. They’re trying to take our symbol of the deer head and they’re taking everything that was our history and making it theirs,” one Buckhead native told me when I went there.
The Buckhead breakaway effort failed for lots of reasons, not the least of which was the effect it would have had on the less affluent Georgians who called the original Buckhead home.
More recently, I’ve written about the Georgians waiting to see what President Donald Trump’s second term will mean for them. Hispanic immigrants are afraid for their families and neighbors in Dalton, where state Rep. Kasey Carpenter said he supports Trump but not his immigration crackdowns on Latino workers.
“Those aren’t people who are here to take your job or hurt you,” Carpenter said. “They’re just living life, trying to do the best they can for their family.”
Likewise, Dr. Dorsey Norwood, a pediatrician in south Atlanta where 85% of her young patients are covered by Medicaid, is worried about what cuts to the insurance program for low-income patients will mean for her practice.
“We are just making ends meet,” she told me. “A 15% cut? I don’t think I’d be able to keep the business.”
As much as I have learned from the voters in Georgia, covering the state’s blockbuster elections has been like a daily trip to the candy shop for a political junkie like me.
Which other state could choose U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, and Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in the same election and see them both become stars in their own parties almost overnight? And where else could the sitting Republican governor be targeted by Trump in 2022, as Gov. Brian Kemp was, but still win his GOP primary by more than 50 points? Trump and Kemp somehow buried the hatchet in 2024, but that could fast be changing over which horse to back in next year’s Senate campaign.
Many of my campaign columns included voices of voters telling us everything we needed to know about where the state was headed in the next election.
In late 2020, I heard from Trump supporters in Alpharetta who told me Joe Biden would never be inaugurated, even though he had already won. I didn’t know what they meant at the time, but I did on Jan. 6. At a Cobb County rally last October, I heard from Black men who told me they didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 but would in 2024 because Democrats had never earned their votes. Now we know they weren’t the only ones who felt that way.
Occasionally my columns have fallen into the “someone has to say it” category. After Herschel Walker’s disastrous, and unfortunately dishonest, run for Senate, I wrote that the campaign had been beneath both him and Georgia voters.
After withdrawing from public view for nearly two years, he quietly reenrolled at UGA to finish the college degree he had never completed. Alongside lots of Georgians, I got to say, “Way to go, Hershel Walker.” In another only-in-Georgia-politics twist, Walker has now been nominated by Trump to be the ambassador to the Bahamas.
Going forward, this column is still going to be about all of the players, leaders, politicos and power seekers who give politics here an unmistakable Georgia accent and influence so much of what happens in the South and the nation. And it will be about y’all, the voters, who put those leaders in power, toss them out and have to live with the consequences of the decisions they make every day.
Reach out at Patricia.Murphy@ajc.com if you have something to share. And welcome to Y’all-itics.
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