The Fight to Turn Georgia Blue

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This month, Georgia flipped: its voters picked a Democrat for President for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first-term election. To a significant degree, Charles Bethea says, this was owing to political organizing among Black voters; after all, Donald Trump still received approximately seventy per cent of the white vote. Bethea tells David Remnick about the political evolution of the state, and he speaks with two Democratic organizers: Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project, and Royce Reeves, Sr., a city commissioner in Cordele, Georgia.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.3	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Nobody was quite expecting the state of Georgia
0:15.2	to become a crucible of politics in America. But a major organizing effort by Democrats gave Georgia to Biden,
0:23.3	the first time for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. Now both of Georgia's Senate seats
0:30.3	are up for grabs in runoff races in January. The stakes could not be higher. These two seats will
0:36.8	determine the balance of power in the Senate,
0:39.3	and that, of course, will be critical to what the Biden administration can and cannot achieve.
0:44.6	It's a new adventure here every day in Georgia.
0:46.5	Did you think that Georgia become the center of the political universe?
0:49.7	I mean, no, not really.
0:52.2	Staff writer Charles Bethay is based in Atlanta, and he's been reporting on all of this for many months.
0:59.0	A lot of people, Biden and Trump supporters alike, spent the days after election day, sweating out the results in Georgia, Charles.
1:06.4	And I've got to say that at least on Twitter, you were calling it for Biden really early. Where did that
1:12.3	confidence in Biden terms come from? Well, I mean, you know, before the election, I felt like demographic
1:21.5	shifts and voter registration drives and concern about Trump's handling of the pandemic was going to benefit Biden
1:30.9	quite a bit. But, you know, on the day of the election and the days following, I knew certain counties,
1:38.1	especially a few north of Atlanta, Cobb County, Gwinnett County, DeKalb County, that these Democrat-leaning counties
1:45.7	were going to potentially be late reporting their returns. And also on election day, there was
1:53.6	a pipe that burst in Fulton County, which is a very Democrat-leaning county. That delayed things
1:59.0	there. So I was pretty confident that while Trump got out to a lead,
2:04.1	Biden was going to make up most of that as returns came in. So Joe Biden is the first Democratic
2:11.4	presidential candidate to win in Georgia for nearly 30 years. And yet as recently as the 2018 midterms, we saw just how hard it is for a
	...

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