October 22, 2024
MACON, Ga. (AP)
— Sabrina Friday scanned the room at Mother’s Nest, an organization in Macon
that provides baby supplies, training, food and housing to mothers in need, and
she asked how many planned to vote. Of the 30, mostly women, six raised their
hands.
Friday, the
group’s executive director, said she tries to stress civic duty, an often
difficult proposition given the circumstances of her clients.
“When a mom is
in a hotel room and there’s six or seven people in two beds and her kids are
hungry and she just lost the car, she doesn’t want to hear too much about
elections,” Friday said. “She wants to hear how you can help.”
Image
Macon is the
largest city in Bibb County, where the majority of residents are Black and one
in four of its population lives in poverty. When Joe Biden became president
four years ago, he promised to tackle the pernicious gap in racial equity — and
in few places is the stubbornness of that challenge as politically significant
in this state that could swing the presidential election.
Located about 80
miles (130 kilometers) south of Atlanta, Bibb County is the kind of place where
Vice President Kamala Harris would need to run up her margin in order to defeat
Donald Trump in this year’s election, a strategy that helped Biden win the state
four years ago as he promised to lift up Black Americans. It won’t be easy:
Bibb County never recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, and Labor
Department data show it had more jobs in 2019 under Trump than it does now.
Trump, the
former president, sees himself as having an opportunity with Black voters,
particularly men. But he and Harris have one thing in common: Each will have a
difficult time persuading people to turn out who typically sit out elections.
More than 47,000 people in Bibb County were eligible to vote in 2020 and
didn’t, a figure roughly four times Biden’s margin of victory across the entire
state. Eligible voters are defined as legal residents who are 18 or older,
according to Census figures.
The Biden-Harris
administration can claim to have addressed three of the four crises it pledged
to fix. The pandemic largely receded three years ago, the economy has improved
and there is a genuine commitment of several hundreds of billions of federal dollars
to tackle climate change. But racial inequality — as measured by the Federal
Reserve — has worsened.
At Mother’s
Nest, Linda Solomon, 58, said she and her daughter aren’t voting “ because
nothing changes " no matter who sits in the White House. “Why you gonna
vote and ain’t nobody doing nothing?”
While Harris has
excited Black voters in and around Atlanta, with its wealthier and
better-educated electorate, interviews in Bibb County suggest voters living in
far worse circumstances are not moved by the historic nature of her candidacy.
Democrats won the county by a 2-1 margin in 2020, and Republicans are
increasingly confident they can erode Democrats’ historic advantage of winning
roughly 90% of all Black votes.
Janiyah Thomas,
Black media director for the Trump campaign, said in an email exchange that
“Black voters in rural America hold the key to America’s future, and President
Trump is the only candidate who has proven he can deliver real results.”
Thomas said
Black unemployment hit historic lows during Trump’s first term, although it
ultimately hit a record low of 4.8% in April 2023 under Biden. But the Black
unemployment rate is now at 5.6%, more than two percentage points higher than
the unemployment rate for white workers and higher than the rate for Asian and
Hispanic workers.
Thomas said
get-out-the-vote efforts are focused on low-propensity voters, adding that they
are using traditional canvassing methods as well as TikTok and outside groups.
She estimated the efforts will reach 15 million doors across the battlegrounds.
The Harris
campaign is relying on having staff on the ground. It has six people in its
Macon office and has been canvassing across the region, including lower-income
and rural areas. The campaign believes lower-income voters receive most of
their news and information on mobile devices and can be reached by its $200
million digital ad push.
While
campaigning, Harris has focused on the middle class, and she has offered plans
for small businesses and home buyers.
In places like
Macon, that could prove a difficult sale. The clients at Mother’s Nest are not
business owners or homebuyers anytime soon, and even Harris’ plan to take on
grocery chains for price gouging doesn’t resonate with a population living in
food deserts.
The outlook of
those patrons falls in line with other Black registered voters. They have an
overwhelmingly positive view of Harris,
but only about half of them believe the outcome of this presidential election
will have “a great deal”
or “quite a bit”
of impact on them personally, according to a recent poll from the AP-NORC
Center for Public Affairs Research.
But the more
nonurban parts of Georgia are only part of the electoral puzzle. It’s a
dramatically different story in Atlanta and its vote-rich suburbs where
enthusiasm runs high for both Harris and Trump, although often divided by race.
A viewing party
of the presidential debate drew scores of well-to-do residents to Buckhead Art
& Company in an affluent uptown neighborhood. Many of the dozens of
attendees, including the owner and hostess, Karimah McFarlane, were part of the
Howard University graduate network. The party had a panel discussion that urged
attendees to focus their efforts on getting young Black men to vote. The first
thing every guest encountered was the voter registration table, complete with
information on Georgia’s system and various deadlines.
McFarlane
explained that Atlanta has attracted small business owners and others because
of the business-friendly atmosphere. What can be less friendly is the voting
system, with some newcomers particularly puzzled by how to vote absentee.
Across town, a
voter registration drive at Spelman College targeted first-time voters. Hosted
by the members of Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and their Alpha Phi
Alpha brothers from Morehouse College, the event began drawing would-be
registrants an hour before sign-ups started. At its peak, dozens of students
crowded the tables set up outside the student union and bookstore. The
organizations could not campaign for, or endorse Harris, but students spoke
freely.
Caleb Cage, 21,
a religion major at Morehouse, said he’d seen the excitement rise for the vice
president “especially among people in my particular demographic, young people.”
Cage is voting absentee in his home state of Maryland.
He said he had
heard about young Black men taking their support to Trump and his response was
to remember what the vote means. “To reiterate the sentiments of our Morehouse
brother, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a vote is a prayer for the future world you want
to see. That’s extremely important for young people.”
But, even on a
storied historically Black college campus, there was an awareness that the
messages that are invigorating college students might not hit others. Elise
Sampson, 20, a junior political science major at Spelman and member of the
sorority co-sponsoring the registration drive, said economic disparities needed
to be part of the discussions.
“It comes down
to an accessibility issue,” she said. “When people don’t feel heard and
represented, it is hard to want to participate in a political system that
doesn’t hear and represent you.”
Malcolm
Patterson, a 21-year-old junior finance major at Morehouse from Marietta,
Georgia, was at the event to support the activity, adding he was already
registered.
“This is my
first presidential election,” Patterson said. “It’s important for us to vote on
the future we hope to see,” he said.
Poor voters are
hidden figures in the election
Even with 2020’s
record number of ballots cast, more than 75 million people eligible to vote did
not cast ballots, according to a study by the Center for Inclusive Democracy at
the University of Southern California.
AP VoteCast, a
survey of both voters and nonvoters, showed that nonvoters in 2020 tended to be
poorer, younger, less educated, unmarried and minorities. The data, collected
by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that among voters
in 2020, 15% reported having a household income under $25,000 in the previous
year, compared with roughly 3 in 10 nonvoters. Put those characteristics
against a population of 27 million adults who live below poverty, according to
the census, and the figures suggest that people on the lower rungs of the
economic ladder probably make up a significant subset of all nonvoters.
Georgia was an
unlikely cauldron of election turmoil
In 2020, the
turnout of people eligible to vote in Georgia was 66.3%, nearly matching the
national figure of 66.8%, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, with
the lowest turnouts among Black and Latino voters.
The
Republican-controlled legislature has sought changes aimed at redressing
complaints fueled by Trump’s false claims of voting fraud in 2020. (Trump is
facing criminal charges in the state for his actions trying to overturn the
result.) That includes requiring a hand count of all ballots cast, though a
Georgia judge has blocked that at least for now. Another change requires
homeless voters to use the address of the county voter registration office
rather than where they live, which could add to the impoverished nonvoter
numbers.
A microcosm of
demographics and census
A majority of
Bibb County’s 150,000-plus residents are minorities and over 60% are unmarried.
Four in 10 are younger than 30 and nearly half have a high school education or
less. The poverty rate is above 25%, more than double the state and national
averages.
In interviews
with dozens of single moms, grandmothers and some men, it was clear that the
campaigns are not addressing their problems.
Solomon came to
Mother’s Nest with her grown son and daughter and grandchildren. None of them
vote, she said. Her son can’t because of a criminal record but she and her
daughter won’t because, “If you ain’t got nothing, nobody has time for you
whether you are Black or white. If you’re poor, you’re poor and they ain’t got
time.”
Friday, who
started the center in 2022, slips in comments on voting and why it’s important,
not just nationally but locally, where issues are decided that impact the
families directly.
“You’d be
surprised that a lot of them just don’t want to because they’ve given up,” she
said.
Dr. Tiffany Hall
hosted a dental clinic and heard the challenges of the attendees first hand,
including how most can’t get preventive dental care until issues become
emergencies.
Tynesha Haslem,
36, listened intently. In an interview, she said she remembered voting — she
believes during one of Barack Obama’s elections — but voting has not been a
priority in a “horrible” life.
She lost the car
she had earlier this year and she and her sons spend nights in a hotel. She is
not registered to vote now but even if she wanted to, it is unclear that she
could because of a felony conviction on her record from 2016 for attacking an
ex-boyfriend. Her top priority is getting a job “hopefully in customer
service,” she said.
Nonvoters have
basic, urgent needs the campaigns don’t address
Cars began
lining up, for more than a mile, near the Unionville Missionary Baptist Church
for a food and clothing giveaway. The first flurry came in a steady flow for an
hour, grabbing canned goods and other produce packaged the night before by
church members.
Levita Carter,
55, was one of the church members and also a teacher in the school system. “Our
children are coming to school hungry,” she said. “They don’t have sufficient
food. They don’t have sufficient clothing.”
Carter’s message
to people using the food pantries and Mother’s Nest: “Our vote counts right
here. We need to start small in our town and our place and get some people in
place right here that can affect change here before we can even get to voting
for president.”
No comments:
Post a Comment