GAINESVILLE, Ga.-- The blocked roads and rumbling bulldozers that ring the town square of Gainesville tell the story of explosive growth that’s come to Hall County, about an hour’s drive northeast of Atlanta.
A boutique hotel is planned for downtown. So is a Hampton Inn. But a nearby park boasts a towering stone sculpture of a chicken on a pillar instead of the Confederate monument you might see elsewhere in the state.
It’s a visual statement that industry, not history, is the driving foundation of the place.
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@
Credit: Alyssa Pointer / Alyssa.Pointer@
Since this is a column about politics, I’ll add that although the population and demographics of Hall County are changing rapidly (the Latino population has more than doubled in 20 years), the politics of the area have barely budged.
George Bush won the county with 70% of the vote in 2000. Donald Trump won with 71% in 2020.
What gives?
“My district was about two-to-one Republican when I ran 10 years ago and it’s about two-to-one Republican now,” state Sen. Butch Miller told me this week over burgers and fries at Collegiate on the Square in Gainesville.
“It’s been my personal experience that the Democrats have not made significant inroads in our region,” he said. “They may in the future but they haven’t in the past and they are not currently.”
Even the Democrats in Hall County don’t argue that point.
“Hall County is an extremely red county,” Mike Ford, the chairman of the Hall County Democrats, told me when I asked him what I should know about the politics in the area. “Have I mentioned that Hall County is an extremely red county? Let me conclude by saying that it’s an extremely red county.”
Ford laughed as he said it, but the underlying point remains serious — that Democrats there have struggled to make meaningful inroads in elections even as the state itself trends more purple. He suggested that intimidation for straying from the GOP party line is one reason.
Much of the success for the GOP in Northeast Georgia comes from the power of the people they’ve elected locally.
Credit: Sara Guevara
Credit: Sara Guevara
Butch Miller is the second-ranking Republican in the Georgia Senate, and he’s now making a bid for lieutenant governor in 2022.
The gregarious car salesman occupies the same district Casey Cagle held before Cagle became lieutenant governor of Georgia. Before that, the district was represented by Nathan Deal, who went to Congress and then served two terms as governor.
The three Republicans didn’t just dominate the GOP power structure in the area, they physically transformed it by directing $220 million worth of taxpayer-funded initiatives to their hometown. Schools, roads and hospitals were all strategically deployed to drive economic development there over generations.
The poultry industry, which once simply shipped white meat and dark meat out to grocery stores, has diversified to include heavy manufacturing and global exports. Health care, education, and technology jobs now number in the thousands, too.
An inland port will soon send those exports by rail directly to the port of Savannah and on to the world.
The result is a boom town with a small-town feel, for now.
State Rep. Matt Dubnik grew up in Hall County and represents one of the most diverse House districts in Georgia.
Although the Census numbers aren’t final for 2020, he estimates that between 40% and 45% of his district is Latino and that Latino voting patterns largely follow that of the broader electorate. Dubnik won with 67% of the vote in 2020.
“When I get out and visit those Latino families and churches and business owners, they say the same things that I do,” he said. “They believe in being fiscally conservative, they believe in their children having a high-quality education and in having lower taxes, just like I do.”
Abortion is also a hot button for the Latino Catholic churches there.
If you were expecting Gainesville to be trending Democratic because its Latino population has more than doubled in 30 years, it’s a mistake to assume a single demographic has a single point of view.
Maria Del Rosario Palacios lived in Gainesville for 26 years and is now the director of the LatinX caucus for the Democratic Party of Georgia.
She said that like all population groups, the Latino community is not monolithic. Older Latinos vote more reliably than younger Latinos. Women vote far more frequently than men. The boomers are more conservative, while the Gen Z Latinos are “woke,” in her words, and animated by social justice for all groups.
And in Gainesville in particular, Ronald Reagan is still king, thanks to the immigration reform act he signed in 1986.
“Our folks still have tended to lean Republican, especially in older generations, and Reagan Republicanism is something that feeds into it,” she said.
A particular challenge for Latinos, of course, is the fact that the voting-eligible population is smaller than the population itself. Some are undocumented, others are permanent residents, but not yet citizens.
Others still are DREAMers, whose status is in the hands of courts.
An explosion at a poultry factory in Gainesville earlier this year served as a reminder that many of the Latinos there are first-generation and in jobs that are difficult at best, and deadly at worst. And many can’t make their voices heard in elections.
Devin Pandy is a Democrat running in Gainesville’s non-partisan mayoral race in November. He’s worried about the communities in the city that he sees being left behind in Hall County’s roaring boom.
“From the outside, it looks great, and even from some perspectives within the city, it looks great,” he said. “It is our duty to the residents of Gainesville to ensure that everyone in the city has every opportunity possible to improve their quality of life.”
It’s a goal that everyone in Gainesville says they share, but like everything in politics, the winner of the election gets to decide who gets the rewards in the end.
This article is the third installment of the AJC’s Georgia Politics Road Trip series, reporting from the road on the politics throughout the state.
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