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If I were a vote-scrounging Republican politician and I wanted to hustle up some black people’s votes, I would think it generally sound policy not to tell them that they’re too stupid to deserve a vote.
State senator Fran Millar, a Republican from the affluent, majority-white Dunwoody section of majority-black DeKalb County here in Georgia, apparently doesn’t feel the same way. In a public Facebook post, he took exception to a plan by county CEO Lee May to open up an extra early-voting site in a South DeKalb mall “dominated by African American shoppers and ... near several large African American mega churches”.
“I would prefer more educated voters than a greater increase in the number of voters,” he added in a comment to his post. “If you don’t believe this is an efort [sic] to maximize Democratic votes pure and simple, then you are not a realist. This is a partisan stunt and I hope it can be stopped.”
Well, yes. It is a partisan move. It shouldn’t be.
The race of voters shouldn’t be a partisan predictor in an ideal world. But here in Georgia, the contests for governor and a US Senate seat are too close to call – and may turn on whether the Democrats can win as much as 30% of the white vote. Seven out of 10 white voters, minimum, are Republicans, and 90% of black voters are Democrats.
Here, all politics are racial politics – and the contests are only close because the number of black and Latino voters in the state has grown so quickly.
May denies the move to open up early voting in the mall was partisan. According to Millar, May said that he asked malls all over the county – including in Dunwoody – if they’d host more polling space, but only the South DeKalb Mall said yes. (Other early-voting polls – including one in north DeKalb – will also be open.)
Nonetheless, Democrats know that a black turnout may make the difference in the contested races – so the mere act of not inconveniencing black voters is, in some people’s minds, partisan.
Polling locations have always been nakedly political – there’s no point denying it, especially in Georgia. It’s in the same vein as gerrymandered redistricting, restrictive ballot access requirements for third parties and the little “I” that incumbents get next to their names on the ballot.
But this change is also a gigantic middle finger to Republicans intent on suppressing black voters, since it was made possible after conservatives on the US supreme court, at the behest of Republicans, eviscerated the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements last year. Before the ruling, the US Department of Justice would have had to sign off on any polling changes, so any last-minute moves like these would have been impossible.
May’s just working within the rules created by Republicans. Besides the now-eliminated preclearance requirements, early voting was created by a Republican-dominated legislature and signed into law by a Republican governor.
Millar’s comments drew the predictable cries of racism, and I know Fran – the accusation is unfair. He’s about the only Republican in metro Atlanta who ever shows up to community events in south DeKalb County, and is often the lone white guy on the dais, if not the whole room. We have real racists running around here, black and white. There’s no need to cheapen the term by conflating Millar’s partisan instincts with racial hate.
But the short shrift Millar and his Republican colleagues give to the idea of actually courting black voters reveals the real problem here. If I were a Republican who wanted to avert the coming demographic Armageddon in Georgia, I could think of worse places to show a little ankle than the South DeKalb Mall in suburban Atlanta.
The mall brims with the kind of entrepreneurial hustle that should make small-business Republicans salivate: it’s a testament to the art and science of grinding out a profit under competitive adversity and working harder than the next guy, because the next guy will drown you and eat your corpse if you don’t. Republicans keep telling black people to bootstrap their way out of poverty; this mall is what that looks like.
For instance, in between the five beauty salons, three different shops selling Nikki Minaj-knockoff wigs and half a dozen eyebrow-threading kiosks all competing for the trickle of Tuesday evening business, I found Sleep Is 4 Suckers, a commercial temple to the god of hustle. David Shands opened the store a month ago to sell his branded T-shirts, and, if I wasn’t broke, I would have bought one just on principle.
Shands is black, and he lives in a black neighborhood, about a mile from my house. Shands is labeled by the Democratic Party’s scoring model as a nominal Democrat – but he’s a Republican who voted for George W Bush in 2004 and has never cast a vote for Barack Obama.
Though business issues matter, he said, his reasons for that are primarily religious. “Obama supports gay marriage,” Shands said of his 2012 vote for Romney. “I don’t believe in that.”
But he’s not even sure he’s going to vote this year – he has no idea who’s on the ballot, Republican or Democrat, and he doesn’t care. He has a business to run, thanks – but, with a polling place just feet away, he might well cast a ballot for the Republicans, no matter what Fran Millar believes about voters in the South DeKalb mall.
When 90% of your neighbors vote Democrat, it takes an act of political will to vote Republican. Shands is exactly the kind of guy Republicans would want to cultivate in an off year election.
But Republicans don’t know that guys like him exist, and they apparently don’t care.
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