Georgia’s GOP looking northward
State’s political shift puts party heartland well outside Atlanta
TOCCOA, Ga. — When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made one of his first general election campaign swings in August, he went straight to the modern heartland of the state’s Republican Party.
It wasn’t Buckhead, the glitzy Atlanta neighborhood where Kemp lives in a governor’s mansion dwarfed by other nearby estates.
And it wasn’t suburban Cobb County, once the bastion of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Instead, Kemp kept going north, deep into the Georgia mountains that have become one of the most Republican areas in the country over the last three decades.
He stopped at a gas station turned coffee shop in Toccoa to urge people “turn out an even bigger vote here in this county and in northeast Georgia than we’ve ever seen before.”
“Ask your kids, your grandkids, your friend’s kid, are they registered to vote?” Kemp told attendees. “If they’re eligible, and they’re not, we got to get them registered, and we’ve got to go tell them to pull it for the home team.”
The emphasis on this rural region represents a notable shift in the GOP’s strategy in Georgia.
The party grew into a powerhouse in Georgia once it began combining a strong performance in the Atlanta suburbs with growing dominance in rural areas.
But that coalition has frayed in recent years as voters in the booming Atlanta region rejected the GOP under former President Donald Trump, turning this onetime Republican stronghold into the South’s premier swing state.
A 41-county region, in
cluding some distant Atlanta suburbs encroaching into north Georgia, now has as many GOP voters as the core of metro Atlanta, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.
Those changing dynamics have intensified pressure on Kemp to maintain — or strengthen — his support in rural mountainous communities like Toccoa to offset losses closer to the capital city.
Kemp won the governor’s office in 2018 by defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams by 1.4 percentage points.
As the two wage a rematch for the job this year, early summer polling found a close race, with some suggesting Kemp has a narrow advantage.
But his reliance on voters like those in Toccoa is driving the party further to the
right.
In a diversifying state, north Georgia is overwhelmingly white.
While Democrats attack and Republicans fret over abortion restrictions in the suburbs, there’s little public wavering in the mountains.
Voters here love guns so much that they cut out the middleman and chose gun dealer Andrew Clyde as one of north Georgia’s two very Trumpy members of Congress.
The other member? Marjorie Taylor Greene. “It reflects a lot of the country right now, in the sense that it’s very populist, very close to the vest, very isolated in the sense of distrust of government, very strong-willed, mountain Appalachian-type individuals that are very self-sufficient,” said former Rep.
Doug Collins, the Republican who preceded Clyde in representing northeast Georgia’s 9th Congressional District.
Kathy Petrella, a Clarkesville retiree who was visiting the state Department of Driver Services in early September in Toccoa, said she’s a “true-blue conservative.”
“It means I don’t believe in the government telling me anything I have to do, except law and order,” said Petrella, who cites her Christian faith as an important anchor of her political affiliation and fears a decline into “communism.”
Lee MacAulay, who lives in the north Georgia town of Cleveland, also was visiting Toccoa.
She said she believes Trump won the 2020 election and calls President Joe
Biden “a ridiculous joke” and “an idiot.”
“I was a Trumper,” MacAulay said. “I am a Trumper.”
Jay Doss, a Toccoa lawyer, said he feels “working-class people are benefited more by the conservative party” and that “I just feel that less government is better for everybody.”
There was once another conservative tradition in north Georgia — in the Democratic Party.
While there were always some Republicans, a legacy of white mountaineers who backed the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War, they won few elections.
“It used to be slap Democrat. If you ran Republican, you could not get elected. Now, if you run Democrat, you ain’t got a chance much of getting elected,” said
Stephens County Commissioner Dennis Bell, a Republican who owns Currahee Station, the coffee shop where Kemp campaigned in Toccoa.
Republicans say formerly Democratic voters gravitated to their party because of cultural issues, but those who study the electorate note white voters are much more likely to be Republican, and Appalachia made a hard turn against Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president.
“The Republican Party has now started organizing itself, I think, to be more in line with the white people who are there — more rural, less urban-interested, even less suburban-interested, in terms of the state party,” Fraga said. “And that’s looks more like North Georgia in a lot of ways.”