‘Now I like him’: Some Black voters in Georgia see Trump as a real option

ALBANY, Georgia — The pews were filling up inside Mount Zion Baptist Church, where former President Bill Clinton was set to launch his rural campaign swing for Vice President Kamala Harris in this Democratic stronghold bordering a sea of rural red Georgia.

In the back, Joseph Parker said he was thrilled the Arkansan was coming. But it had been nearly a quarter-century since Clinton left office and, Parker said, “Things were really different then.”

This year, he said he’s voting for former President Donald Trump, the first time the 72-year-old has cast a ballot for a Republican presidential candidate.

“Trump’s a man of his word. What he says he’s gonna do, he does,” Parker said, after initial reluctance to reveal his preference. “And everything is so high now — groceries high, clothes, everything, gas. And four years ago, it wasn’t that high. And so people see the difference in Kamala Harris and Trump, and they want some of what they had four years ago. And I do, too.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Democrats are working to shore up the coalition that helped turn Georgia in their favor in the presidential election four years ago and in two Senate races in 2021. But in a state where President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020, drawing 88 percent of the Black vote, months of public polling showing some Black men moving toward Trump is part of the reason the former president appears stronger in Georgia than this time four years ago.

Overwhelmingly, the audience at Mount Zion on Sunday was behind the goal of pushing Harris to the Oval Office, cheering at times as Clinton spoke; the church’s pastor, the Rev. Daniel Simmons, even instructed those who came forward for the altar call to listen to Clinton’s speech before going into another room to receive spiritual counseling.

Clinton’s trip this past weekend was confined to the rural part of the Peach State. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia before Biden — and by margins almost as narrow — Clinton said he told the Harris campaign, “Send me to the country.”

But it isn’t just in rural Georgia that Harris has work to do. Back in the cities, too, Democrats are trying to build support among voters of color, as a small faction of them shift toward Trump. As part of what it describes as its largest operation in Georgia yet, the campaign has been hosting events like “Brothas and Brews” in Atlanta last week, while gathering Black farmers recently in Byromville. Just after taking over the ticket, Harris held a large rally in Atlanta with prominent Black entertainers Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo.

But for all the support Harris has in this state, Trump is still cutting into her margins — even with some voters who express reservations about him.

Arthur Beauford, a 28-year-old from Marietta, said he decided to vote for the first time this election — for Trump, despite his family members still being “Democrat, all the way.” Beauford said it’s not just him, that he keeps hearing similar remarks from other young Black men nearly every time he is at the gym: Comments about Trump being “funny.” “Entertaining.” Even “brave,” Beauford said, noting it’s not uncommon to hear his peers talking about an unspecified “they” who are out to get the former president.

“I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of Trump,” Beauford said, “but I’ll definitely take Trump over Harris,” adding that he was impressed by Trump’s business experience, while suggesting that Harris, a former prosecutor, California attorney general and senator, wasn’t qualified and “just seems to have been given everything” in her career.

Samuel Kem, a 25-year-old Black voter from Kennesaw, cast his ballot for Biden in 2020, in large part because of what he said was news coverage suggesting Trump didn’t lead well during the pandemic. But Kem, who graduated last year from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, said he now lives with his family due to the high cost of living and also changed his mind on “migration issues” over the last four years.

“I wouldn’t say he’s perfect or anything,” Kem said of Trump, adding that he thinks Trump should do more on climate change. “He will get the job done. He’s very talented in, like, diplomatic relations with other countries with mutual respect.”

Republicans are working to turn out more new Trump voters. Walking through a residential neighborhood in Lilburn this week, several women from the Faith & Freedom Coalition moved from door to door following instructions on an app the organization uses for its massive nationwide field operation. Among the conservative Christian organization’s paid door knockers was 47-year-old Fabienne Durocher, a member of the Haitian community who moved to Lawrenceville three years ago after living in New York. In the last election, Durocher supported Biden.

“I’m going to tell you the truth. I didn’t like him. But now, I like him,” Durocher said of Trump. “I don’t like when Democrats are talking about abortion. I don’t want that. So I said, for that, I’m going to change my mind. I’m going to vote for Trump.”

Durocher is among the Creole-speaking door knockers whom the Faith & Freedom Coalition has employed this election, and they’ve translated door-handle voting guides into the language in an effort to not just reach African American voters, but Haitian Americans as well.

Asked about Trump’s recent false accusations about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating neighbors’ household pets, Durocher said, “I keep seeing that on the TV, I don’t know if it is true. But I really don’t like when they’re talking bad about Trump.”

Howard Franklin, a Democratic strategist in Georgia, said Trump’s “wealth and his celebrity and his willingness to at least speak unlike a politician, unvarnished — I don’t think it would do Democrats any good to deny there’s some appeal there.”

But Franklin said he is banking on what history has shown, that Georgia’s Black voters like himself “tend to come home and vote with the Democratic Party.” He said that while the Democrats’ minority outreach “used to be all barber shops and beauty salons,” they’re now deploying prominent surrogates to speak to small business owners about issues like economic opportunity.

So what, exactly, changed in Georgia since 2020, when mid-October polling averages showed Biden with a narrow lead over Trump, and voter surveys now show Trump with a slim edge over Harris?

“Let’s just boil it down to good old fashioned buyer’s remorse,” said Jason Shepherd, the former chair of the Cobb County Republican Party. “People have been hit in the wallet. All the sudden, all those mean tweets and crazy comments from Trump just don’t seem as important as a positive balance on your bank account.”

There were real concerns in 2020, Shepherd said, with the then-incumbent’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic — not just from his musing about injecting bleach, but his rebuke of Georgia’s popular governor, Brian Kemp, for reopening the state for business sooner than Trump wanted.

Then Trump railed against early voting measures, so much so, Shepherd recalled, that the Cobb County GOP office received calls at the end of the early voting period from people who said they didn’t cast their ballots early because Trump had advised them to vote on Election Day, but who then couldn’t vote for one Covid reason or another.

“What should I do?” they’d ask the county party.

And those were just the ones who bothered to track down the number for the Cobb GOP, Shepherd said, speculating that there were many more in similar positions. The county shifted leftward, from supporting Hillary Clinton by 2 points in 2016 to Biden by 14 points in 2020.

Across the state, 24,000 Georgia Republican primary voters cast ballots in the spring of 2020 but didn’t vote in the November election, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced soon after the election — saying Trump’s rhetoric on voting by mail cost him the election.

Now, the fear of the pandemic has lifted for most people. And while Trump still criticizes early voting, both he and nearly all swing state GOP officials are urging Republicans to vote as early as possible.

And beyond the mechanics of the election, there have been signs for two years here that Republicans could make gains with voters who used to be reliably Democratic. Kemp, who is more popular in the state than Trump, more than doubled his support with Black voters in the 2022 election, going from receiving 5 percent in his first gubernatorial bid in 2018 to 12 percent of the Black vote four years later, according to surveys conducted by the Associated Press.

“This race is between college educated and non-college educated. And in the Black community, this race is between working-class and what I call the bourgeois college-educated class,” said Shelley Wynter, a Black conservative radio host in Atlanta. “If you went to college, an HBCU, were part of the Divine Nine, you’re all in for Kamala Harris.”

But for those in the Black community who aren’t steeped in those kinds of legacy institutions, Wynter continued, there’s some degree of openness toward Trump this time around.

By Ralph Reed’s telling, Georgia going into the 2020 election “was genuinely a jump ball” after Democrats had made the state competitive in 2018. But in the four years that have passed since November 2020, Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, former leader of the Christian Coalition and past Georgia GOP chair, said the state has ever so slightly tipped back toward Republicans.

“Probably 51-49. Maybe 50.5-49.5,” Reed said.

“When you’re talking about a state where 30 percent of the electorate is African American and another 4 percent are minorities other than Hispanic, it’s a big deal if you move that even a little bit,” Reed said. “The thing we don’t know: Is that actually going to be the outcome on Election Day?”

One well-connected Republican strategist in the state, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that polling in the state in past cycles has been “too young and too male.”

“They are not the reliable Georgia voters. On Election Day, our Black population is always more female, and older,” the strategist said.

At a Sunday afternoon fish fry attended by local Democratic activists in Peach County, most of whom were Black, Clinton stood mouth agape and grinning. He propped his arm on the shoulder of 77-year-old Calvin Smyre, who after 48 years in the Georgia House was the longest serving member of the state Legislature and a fixture in southwest Georgia politics. He borrowed a pen from Smyre to tweak his notes. They listened as a pair of brothers spoke, Warren and Howard James, “lifetime Black farmers” from Macon County.

“I don’t know if we can make it without Georgia,” Clinton, standing in the grass, said to the crowd huddled under two shade trees. “But I’ll tell you this. They have one heck of a hill to climb if we do win Georgia, and it won’t hurt Mr. Trump to climb a few more hills. I’ll even pray for him — but not to get to the top before we do.”