I won't tell you that it's gonna be okay.

I won't tell you that it's going to be okay.

Welcome to another episode of the Bakari Sellers podcast.

Today we have Maya King.

She is a friend of the show and she's been on the show before so we'll skip our usual introduction but since we last spoke you

left Politico and you're now with the illustrious New York Times can you talk a

little bit about your beat in your assignment covering the South for the New York Times? What's that like?

Sure. So I'm on the politics team now at the New York Times. I cover the South as a region. It's about eight states, but the big focus for the last, I would say, nine months that I've been at the times has been the biggest state in the South politically and that would be Georgia. So I am now based in Atlanta and have really spent like the last several months just driving up and down 85 following a lot of the different candidates.

Riding dirty on 85, slow taking it easy.

Shout out to the Young Bloods, man, you know, that's back in my college days.

Let's dive deep into your article that you did on Stacy Abrams.

But if you could sum up what happened in Georgia a few weeks ago, and why didn't we see, I think I know the answer, but why didn't we see a clearly far superior candidate and

Raphael Warnock went outright and how did someone like Brian Kemp thread the needle of being vilified by both the right and the left and when can see convincingly against Stacy Abrams?

Georgia Republicans saw this election as a chance to prove to themselves in the rest of the country that Georgia was not the really purple swing state. I think that a lot of people believed it to be and we can't really make any final

you know conjectures on whether or not Georgia really did but really is still a purple state or a swing state I do believe it is but you know

last or two Tuesday's ago November 8th was a really good night for Republicans

Brian Kemp as you pointed, was able to thread the needle while still being a Trump enemy,

was able to galvanize the conservative

the base in Georgia to come back and vote for him overwhelmingly. He also had a lot of moderate

conservatives in his corner and he had a number of Democrats who liked his

policies who felt that he did a decent job over the last four years

and who really liked that he stood up to Trump and voted for him and also Secretary of State

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