Geoff Duncan is the Republican lieutenant governor of Georgia. He is forty-six, a former minor-league baseball player and health-care executive, and is relatively new to politics, having first run for the state legislature in 2012. On March 8th, he was presiding over the state Senate when a Republican bill restricting voting access came to the floor. The bill and a parallel proposal in the Georgia House were already notorious for the severity of some of their provisions: sharply restricting absentee voting, eliminating three-quarters of the ballot drop boxes in metro Atlanta, making it illegal for anyone who is not an election worker to supply water to people waiting in line to vote, and closing polls during the final Sundays before an election, when Black churches traditionally conduct their turnout operation, known as “Souls to the Polls.” Duncan had no material way to register an objection—the lieutenant governor has no vote—but he thought the bill misguided enough that he walked out of the chamber rather than lead the vote on it. When Greg Bluestein, the great political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, tracked down Duncan, he was sitting in his office, chin in his hand, watching the vote to pass the bill on TV. In front of him were two cans of Coke Zero.
Duncan’s dissent had no effect on the outcome of the debate. Governor Brian Kemp signed a version of the bill, which passed on a party-line vote, into law on March 25th, without a strict ban on Sunday voting but with most of the other provisions intact. But Duncan’s reaction did provide an early clue about how poorly the bill would go over with Atlanta’s corporate mainstream. A day after it was signed, Delta’s C.E.O., Ed Bastian, released a cautious statement, praising Republicans for having eliminated some of the most egregious provisions. Five days later, in an internal memo sent to Delta’s employees, he called the bill “unacceptable,” after his company came under pressure from Black Lives Matter protesters (and, perhaps more significant, from a network of Black business executives). Coca-Cola’s C.E.O. issued a similar statement that same day, saying he wanted “to be crystal clear” that the soft-drink company did not support the law, which “makes it harder for people to vote, not easier.” On April 2nd, Major League Baseball announced that it was pulling its All-Star Game out of Atlanta. On April 10th, more than a hundred C.E.O.s convened a Zoom call to discuss the fallout and how they could make clear that they stood for voting rights nationwide. This week, the actor Will Smith and the director Antoine Fuqua announced that a movie they’d planned to make in Georgia would now be filmed somewhere else. The title—is it too on the nose?—is “Emancipation.”
One way to consider the issue was as an eternal struggle: conservatives seek to limit the franchise, voting-rights groups and Democratic politicians aim to expand it. The newly elected Senator Raphael Warnock, the longtime pastor at Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s church in Atlanta, said that the bill represented “Jim Crow in new clothes.” Stacey Abrams similarly called it “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” In many ways, the label fit: the intent to suppress the votes of Black Atlantans seemed both deliberate and clear. The Democrats were unified in their opposition to the law; the Republicans, although they had managed to pass it without breaking ranks, had unsettled their own coalition. Conservatives had either misjudged their relationship with corporate Atlanta or no longer cared to maintain it.
When I reached Duncan on the phone on Monday, he emphasized what he thought was one of the real causes of the legislation: in December, Rudy Giuliani, then acting as President Trump’s emissary, had travelled to Atlanta and made his case to a legislative committee that the November election had been stolen. Duncan described the sessions as “hours of airtime to off-gas the most ridiculous conspiracy theories that you’ve ever heard.” This presentation, similar to ones that dozens of judges threw out or rejected, seemed intended less to persuade legislators than to raise the temperature among conservative voters. On this count, it succeeded. By the end of last year, nearly three-quarters of Georgia Republicans told pollsters that they thought the election had been stolen. Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, the Republican officials who refused Trump’s entreaties to overturn the election results in Georgia, reported that they and their families had received death threats. Duncan, who reported last November that his office had not seen any “credible examples” of widespread voter fraud, said that his family had, too. Duncan did not see this as an organic phenomenon. “It really was this revving-the-base process,” Duncan said. “If seventy-five per cent of Republicans think the Earth is flat, it’s our job to walk into those G.O.P. meetings and tell them it’s not flat, it’s round, and here is the proof. That’s the heavy lift.”
When I asked Duncan if he thought the bill’s Republican supporters had anticipated the corporate backlash, he replied, “Obviously not.” Duncan said, “In a perfect world, I would have loved to have seen—around the All-Star Game—the business community, Major League Baseball, the owners, pump the brakes for a couple of weeks and lock ourselves in a room with a bunch of sandwiches and warm coffee, to figure out, is there a pathway forward.” Duncan thought that maybe there could have been some voter-registration event, or “an intense collaboration with inner-city communities, and communities of color.” The warm coffee, the sandwiches, the well-secured room, an agreement that might have paired voter restrictions with some show of voter registration and averted a boycott—this was a vision of the Republican establishment as it had long existed. But, in the present, it wasn’t obvious that the business establishment had an incentive to avert a conflict with the legislature. Perhaps more strikingly, it wasn’t really obvious that the Republicans in the legislature had an incentive to avert a conflict with the corporations.
Republicans have held the governorship in Georgia since 2003, and most of their candidates have won election comfortably. The Party has controlled both houses of the state legislature since 2005. Historically, this coalition has been the George W. Bush coalition, the New South coalition—a union of corporate interests and evangelical ones. Among Republicans who came of age in the Bush era, and the gentler variety of talk-radio hosts, you can still hear a tone of reassurance that the American majority belongs to prosperous conservatives—these are the notes that Mike Pence hits, and for much of this century they have been struck throughout the suburban South. David Lublin, the chair of the government department at American University and a scholar of the South’s political transitions, noted that the Northern stereotype of voters who fought against abortion and other liberal social measures “are the poor Bubba from rural Georgia, the guy who owns a pickup truck who barely runs and who smokes and drinks beer on the wreckage of his old car in the yard. That’s not, in fact, the case. The people who built the evangelical movement were middle-class suburbanites.” It is hard to even build a megachurch in a rural area, Lublin pointed out, “because there aren’t enough people.”
But this coalition, and this tone, were built on circumstances that no longer exist. Charles Bullock, a political-science professor at the University of Georgia, noted that in 1996 the Georgia electorate was roughly three-quarters white, and the state legislature’s Republican majority had a different perspective on voting access. In 2005, it passed an early, strict voter-I.D. law, as well as a law expanding absentee voting. But as the largest American cities have boomed, the Atlanta area has expanded in particular. It’s now home to the second-largest Black population in the United States, trailing only New York, and educational attainment in the Atlanta area runs considerably ahead of that in Georgia as a whole. The state’s electorate is now only fifty-eight-per-cent white, according to Bullock, and, as the parties have realigned around education, the places that are growing fastest are also slipping away from conservatives. “The way I’d characterize it is you have the growth South and the stagnant South, and the growth South is where the Democrats are making headway,” Bullock said.
A little ruefully, Bullock told me that, not long ago, he had briefed both the Democratic and Republican caucus in the Georgia legislature on these demographic trends, a presentation he thought might persuade some Republicans to expand their outreach to Black and Latino communities. Conservative campaign consultants could see the case, he said, “but it clearly didn’t resonate with the rank-and-file members.” And, he went on, why should it? As bad as the 2020 election in Georgia had been for Republicans on the national level, throwing both its electoral votes and control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats, in the state legislature Republicans had suffered a loss of just three seats, and its members, many of them ensconced in safe districts, still control state government. Bullock said, “The losses, at least this year, really didn’t affect these legislators.”
A good question right now is whether anything will. Corporations can’t isolate themselves as easily as rural politicians can; they are dependent not on votes but on markets, which makes them especially interested in prosperity and youth. The Republican relationship with business is often what unites the stagnant South and the growth South, or cities and rural areas. Plenty of Republicans seem comfortable severing it. Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, recently accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of serving as a “front service for woke corporations who are trying to peddle anti-American theories.” Marco Rubio, of Florida, warned in a USA Today op-ed that “the days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community are over.” Josh Hawley, of Missouri, this week proposed a ban on mergers and acquisitions by all companies with a market capitalization of more than a hundred billion dollars, and warned of the increasing exercise of political power by “industry across the board.”
To Republicans like Duncan, all of this might seem a miscalculation—a Giuliani-induced stumble. But the politics of the Georgia bill seemed clear. Plenty of Republicans—in Georgia, the vast majority of elected Republicans—are perfectly comfortable being on the wrong side of corporations. No matter whether you can still hear its echoes in talk radio, the politics of the New South are gone. When Delta denounced the voting bill as “unacceptable,” Georgia’s House of Representatives did not cower. Instead, it passed a bill revoking a tax break on jet fuel.
