Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via AP Images
Democratic candidate for Senate Jon Ossoff waves while greeting a supporter during a drive-through yard sign pick-up event, November 22, 2020, in Alpharetta, Georgia.
In the runoff election for Georgia’s two Senate seats, incumbent insider-trading barons David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing off against Jon Ossoff (former intern to John Lewis and the confounding recipient of his political blessing) and the Rev. Raphael Warnock (a progressive pastor with deep ties to the network of Black churches running through Georgia). The GOP pair hope dissatisfaction with a Biden win will deliver them victory. Ossoff and Warnock hope the same voter-turnout machine that propelled Biden to victory last month, largely based in the Atlanta area and other urban pockets of the state, will provide a second miracle in as many months.
Hundreds of millions in campaign funds have flooded in on both sides of the race, mirroring Democrats’ failed big-money campaigns in critical Senate races across the country. Georgia Democrats hope that the strategy Rahm Emanuel “perfected” at the DCCC—dragging light-on-policy milquetoast candidates across the finish line with mountains of cash—can be bolstered in the house that Stacey Abrams built.
But with all eyes on Atlanta and its suburbs, one demographic in Georgia is being left out: the rural voters who could swing the election. The map of America’s partisan breakdown has emerged as a Rorschach test for political spectators and for those on the right—it depicts a country ruled by a minority liberal elite even in the face of its sprawling red and rural heartland. For liberals, who see no issue in a map that glows crimson but for a shimmer of azure along the coasts, population density tells a different and immutable story. But for rural voters abandoned by the Democratic Party and suffering under the weight of COVID-19, change is the only thing they could ask for.
Weeks away from the January 5 Election Day, ad buys from Democrats and Republicans in Georgia are mirroring the national strategy that played out during the general election, with the GOP far outspending in the rural south and north, and the Democratic machine buying out the airwaves in Atlanta and Georgia’s other big urban markets. Outside the cities, Democrats’ ground game is sparse. Warnock has fared better than Ossoff on the rural front, tapping into his grassroots network cultivated through his time as pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church (where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, and his father before him). Meanwhile, Ossoff has relied on a last-minute bus tour and that most sacred of political weapons: the yard sign.
These two tactics were highlighted by Ossoff’s campaign as the cornerstones of his rural-outreach strategy, but as one rural organizer in southern Georgia told the Prospect, “we had to drive all the way to Atlanta just to pick up the signs!” The same organizer, who spoke to the Prospect on background for fear of reprisal from the Democratic Party, said that they were one of multiple rural organizers whom Ossoff personally called over the summer to inform them that rural ad buys and outreach beyond the urban core weren’t on the table. “It’s not part of our strategy,” he said.
Beyond failing to spend significantly on ad spots and outreach in rural Georgia, Democratic hopefuls have also missed core opportunities to attack Perdue’s record on rural issues. One of these is Trade Adjustment Assistance, created in 1962 by John F. Kennedy to let workers apply for training and temporary income assistance after layoffs caused by rising imports and offshoring. In 2015, Perdue voted unsuccessfully to kill that program. Nonetheless, from 2015 to last August, Georgia lost 8,742 TAA-certified jobs, including more than 2,400 at a Husqvarna factory in McRae, 196 at a distribution center in Dublin, and 128 at an irrigation firm in Valdosta. Perdue also voted to rub salt in workers’ wounds by opposing another amendment in 2015 to fund the TAA program at $575 million, the level established by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Extension Act of 2011.
Matt Barron, a rural strategist who produced Indivisible’s radio and print ads targeting rural voters for the Georgia runoffs, says that unlike Loeffler, Perdue has a six-year voting record replete with attacks against rural voters, which Democrats have failed to adequately prioritize alongside their focus on the corruption plaguing Perdue’s personal finances. “Ossoff is clueless on agriculture, the state’s largest economic sector,” Barron said. “He has not held Perdue’s feet to the fire on opposing funding for VA programs that help rural vets receive care in their communities, or his war against multiyear infrastructure bills to fix rural roads, or protecting the rural Postal Service with a moratorium on closing mail processing plants.”
Perdue has a six-year voting record replete with attacks against rural voters, which Democrats have failed to adequately prioritize.
But while Ossoff may have failed to prioritize, President-elect Joe Biden has added fuel to the flames of rural outrage. Last week, Biden departed from the casual disinterest in rural voters that has defined the Georgia runoffs to a posture of outright disdain, with his announcement that Tom Vilsack will be restored to his chair at the head of the USDA—a reprisal role from his time in the Obama Cabinet, where he earned the ire of progressives and the nickname “Mr. Monsanto.” As the Prospect reported last week, Vilsack was part of Biden’s failed rural-outreach strategy, carried water for the biggest titans of agribusiness poisoning America’s soil and ruining family farmers, and most importantly for the Georgia runoffs, enraged Black farmers.
In addition to sending “a lower share of loan dollars to black farmers than [the USDA] had under President Bush,” Vilsack also played a role in firing one of Georgia’s most important civil rights heroes, Shirley Sherrod. After an intentionally altered video of Sherrod circulated across right-wing media outlets, Sherrod was fired from her role as state director for rural development, in a dark display of Democrats’ willingness to distance themselves from progressive activists at a moment’s notice. Sherrod gave a weary endorsement of Vilsack after it was announced that he would return to the USDA, but given the opportunity, she could have provided Biden and his chances for controlling the Senate a massive boost on the Georgia campaign trail.
Sherrod not only survived the racial pogroms of the 1960s—her father was killed by a white farmer, her family targeted by the Klan with a burning cross—she thrived despite the bitter racism festering in the postwar South, starting a radical communal farm run by Black farmers, modeled on the socialist kibbutz movement, called New Communities. In the face of America’s dual legacies of racial genocide and rural neglect, Sherrod secured a powerful seat in the USDA, only to have her vision for radical equality cast to the wayside by a Democratic machine heading for a cliff.
In an interview in 2012, Sherrod said that while a piece of her wanted to pack up and leave the South for good, she realized she had to stay and fight for the people in rural communities who didn’t have that option.
I wanted to leave the farm and leave the South … Because my father was murdered during my senior year of high school. In fact, March of 1965. See, I wanted to do something about what had happened. I couldn’t pick up a gun and go and kill the person. But I had to do something. And it just occurred to me that night as I prayed that I could give up my dream of leaving Baker County and living in the North and stay to make things different, not just for those of us in Baker but for others. And I didn’t want people to ever forget my father, Hosie Miller.
Win or lose come January 5, Democrats’ sidelining of Sherrod is representative of a larger failure to elevate rural leaders as crucial allies in the fight for racial and economic justice. Despite the attacks against her, Sherrod and her organization, the Southwest Georgia Project, have been running voter drives for the runoff. If Sherrod can find the strength to mobilize rural voters, so must the Democratic Party.
