In battleground Georgia, poor people see no reason to vote. That decision could sway election
GARY FIELDS October 22, 2024
Linda Solomon, a client at Mother's Nest in Macon, Ga., poses for a photo on June 22, 2024. She does not intend to vote because she feels the lives of the poor don't improve regardless of what party controls the White House and government. (AP Photo/Gary Fields)
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Key Takeaways
In Bibb County, Georgia, a majority Black and impoverished area, voter turnout remains low despite efforts from both parties to engage the community.
The Biden-Harris administration has made progress in addressing various crises, but racial inequality has worsened, particularly in areas like Bibb County where economic struggles persist.
Nonvoters in Georgia, who tend to be poorer, younger, less educated, unmarried, and minorities, face urgent needs that are not being addressed by political campaigns.
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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.”
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 Bidenbecame 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…Another Obama
https://www.yahoo.com/news/battleground-georgia-poor-people-see-041119022.html