Are President Joe Biden’s over-the-top attacks on Georgia’s election laws (“Jim Crow on steroids”) backfiring? That’s a question I asked in my most recent Washington Examiner column, and it appears that the answer is yes.
Biden, as widely noted, ducked a question of whether the Masters Golf Tournament should be shunned or moved from its location in Augusta, Georgia. Stacey Abrams, the defeated 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, has been denying support for Major League Baseball’s moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver, a move that has apparently cost metro Atlanta jobs and business. Those negatively affected seem to be disproportionately black.
That should be no surprise. Georgia, with 10.7 million people, is now the eighth-most populous state, having passed Michigan and having maintained its slight lead over North Carolina over the past decade, according to the Census Bureau’s 2020 estimates. Indeed, if 2010-20 growth percentages are maintained for the 2020-30 period, Georgia will come very close to displacing Ohio from the No. 7 position.
A key component of Georgia’s growth has been an influx of Americans of African descent. The percentage of black Americans living in the South has been rising slightly since the low point in 1970, with a slight reversal of the huge Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the large cities of the North between 1940 and 1965. Metro Atlanta, with its substantial economic growth and its Southern cultural atmosphere, has been a magnet for that movement of population.
Relatively few black newcomers have settled inside the city limits of Atlanta, which contains only about 5% of the total metro-area population; very many have moved into suburban counties to the southeast, south, and southwest of downtown Atlanta. You can see the results of this in the increasing voter turnout and increasing Democratic percentages over the past two decades in many of these counties. If “voter suppression,” as Abrams has repeatedly charged, is the purpose of Georgia’s election laws, it has been singularly unsuccessful.
As a result, Georgia now has the largest number of black residents of any state. It’s slightly ahead of Texas, which is No. 2, and has wider leads over Florida and New York, which are No. 3 and No. 4, respectively. The Census Bureau estimates that just under 4 million of Georgia’s 10.7 million people are black — 3,996,697, to be exact. It is followed by two other Southern states, Texas (3,908,287) and Florida (3,772,874), and then by New York (3,424,002).
Georgia’s black residents are 33.5% of the total population, just ahead of Louisiana’s 33.4%, and exceeded by only one other state — Mississippi with 38.9%. The District of Columbia is also higher, with 47.0%, but that’s far below the 71.1% black figure for Washington half a century ago, in the 1970 Census.
One can see why Abrams should be embarrassed to see how her disrespect of Georgia’s election laws is now inflicting economic penalties on the voters whose support she has sought and presumably will seek again, and especially on the black voters who supported her in large numbers. And one can see why Biden should be embarrassed as well. As Walter Olson, longtime proprietor of the Overlawyered blog, tweeted, “Here’s what I believe, which I expect to go on believing no matter who’s in office: Presidents shouldn’t support boycotts of states, maybe even especially of states that voted for them.”
