I didn’t have to log many miles on my Georgia politics road trip this week to find a big political story. And one of the biggest in the state is happening just north of Atlanta in Forsyth County, where the politics of the once rural county are changing as rapidly as the faces there.
Forsyth was once known as a “sundown town” after a violent racial cleansing there pushed out every Black citizen for decades. A nationally ridiculed Klu Klux Klan march there in 1987 only deepened the county’s racist reputation.
But fast forward to 2023 and census figures show Forsyth now has a 20% foreign-born population and the state’s fastest growing portion of Asian residents, with most immigrating from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere in South Asia. Hindu temples and cricket fields are easy to find. And the highly-rated Forsyth County school system is now majority minority, with white students making up 49% of the population, Asian students 27%, Latino students 15% and Black students 5%.
The changes are visible during a drive through Cumming and beyond, which reveals hay fields and rust-roof barns giving way to multi-family homes and high-tech office parks.
The physical metamorphosis has brought political changes, too.
While Joe Biden didn’t flip any Georgia counties from red to blue to win the state in 2020, he did expand Democrats’ share of the vote in Forsyth by five percentage points in 2020 from 2016. And Donald Trump’s 2016 finish, with 71% of the vote, was 10 points worse than Mitt Romney did in 2012, when he won Forsyth with 81% of the vote.
Nobody may embody the changing politics of Forsyth better than Kannan Udayarajan, who immigrated from India in 2007, became a citizen in 2017, and is now the chair of the Forsyth Democratic Party.
Like many new immigrants at the time, he said he was not politically active in his early years here. But the 2008 election caught his attention for the civility between Barack Obama and John McCain.
“I still remember telling my father back home in India that hey, this is why American democracy is so great,” he said.
Donald Trump’s combative 2016 campaign and subsequent election pushed him to both seek American citizenship and become more engaged in his Forsyth community. “That to me was a big, big deviation from what I saw in 2008, between McCain and Trump,” he said.
In 2020, when-U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s mispronounced the name of Vice President Kamala Harris - the country’s first Asian-American vice president - at a Trump rally before the election, Udayarajan decided to mobilize even more, this time for Democrats.
Although he now sees both parties reaching out to the immigrant community locally, the fact that county Democrats choose an immigrant like him to lead them, he said, was “a big thing.”
“I always tell people that it wouldn’t happen in India,” he laughed. “And that it happened in Forsyth County of all places is a huge thing. It just shows how great this country is.”
Like Udayarajan, Subjabit Roy said Barack Obama’s 2008 election first caught his attention, but Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and the pair of U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia made him actively work for Democrats. “I didn’t like what I was seeing on TV and what I was reading in the news,” he said.
Roy, a software developer, found his way to Forsyth from Cobb County in 2015. “A lot of my friends had moved here and I was working from home and houses were being built,” he said. “I love the community here and it was so vibrant so I moved.”
Republicans have dominated the county for so long that Melissa Clink, the Democratic party chair in 2020, said her group’s modest goal as recently as 2016 was to simply normalize being a Democrat in the GOP-dominated area.
“When one political thought is really the dominant ideology, when we presented a counter to that, it seemed that people were really looking for another option,” she said.
They’ve now made a goal of running challengers to every Republican on the ballot, which they’ve done for the last two election cycles. None of them won.
Everyone I spoke with in Forsyth described a large group of voters in both parties as being mostly moderate. And that’s what worries Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor who represented Forsyth in the state Senate before he ran statewide.
Duncan is a classic chamber-of-commerce Republican who clashed with Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 elections. He blames Trump’s rhetoric and behavior for Republicans losses in the state and corresponding dip in presidential election results in Forsyth.
“I think Forsyth County turning ‘less red’ is more of a reflection of a turning away from the national political rhetoric and the Republican, Trumpian smell,” he said. “There is still a very tight focus on conservative policies.”
Duncan has seen the county change first hand, as his kids’ schools and Little League teams have become more diverse. He said the new immigrant community is not politically monolithic and should naturally align with the kind of economy-centric politics he has focused on, if that’s what’s on the ballot.
But having Trump as a nominee will sink the GOP’s chances in Georgia again, starting with Forsyth.
“The middle in Forsyth County is actually very, very conservative. They’re just not angry about it,” he said. “They’re not Donald Trump supporters.”
GOP consultant Brian Robinson said Forsyth is the kind of county where statewide Republican candidates have to post “gaudy” numbers to offset Democrats’ strength in Atlanta and other urban centers.
Trump’s 66% in 2020 was not gaudy enough. But Gov. Brian Kemp’s 73% result two years later was just what the doctor ordered for the governor to cruise to reelection.
“Any Republican must do very well in Forsyth County,” he said. “If you don’t, you won’t win Georgia.”
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