Democrats find themselves at odds with each other over Major League Baseball’s decision to relocate the All-Star Game away from Georgia this year over the state’s new election law.
Georgia’s Republican-led state Legislature passed new election reform laws in the wake of a contentious recount after Joe Biden won the state by just over 10,000 votes. Two Republican incumbents lost their Senate seats just several weeks later in close runoff races.
Democrats accused Republicans of having racist intentions when creating the new law establishing voter photo ID requirements for absentee mail-in ballots, restricting political organizations from offering refreshments to voters in line, limiting drop boxes for ballots to polling places, and eliminating the secretary of state from the election board, among other provisions.
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Back in mid-March, Democrat-allied activist groups, such as Black Voters Matter, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and the Georgia NAACP, announced they launched a pressure campaign on leading firms in Georgia’s business community in an effort to get those companies to denounce the legislation.
“We’ve got the power of organized people. They’ve got the power of organized money. And between us and them, we could put pressure on these legislators or, worst case scenario, the governor to kill these bills,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told CNBC.
Although a number of the Georgia-based companies came out with public condemnations, for some activists, that was not enough, and a boycott of Georgia was called for instead. The MLB followed through by announcing it would relocate its planned All-Star Game from Cobb County, Georgia. The move was approved by President Joe Biden as well as former President Barack Obama.
“The president has made his concerns about the bill passed in Georgia clear, given its extreme provisions that impact the ability of so many citizens to cast their votes,” the White House said. “He said earlier this week that if the decision was made by Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game, he would certainly support that decision, and now that MLB has made that choice, he certainly does.”
In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Democrat and former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said the new election law should not push the state’s largest companies to boycott the state “yet” but that the corporations should, instead, publicly condemn the new legislation and invest in expanding voting policy Abrams may personally support before the companies join a boycott movement.
“The companies that stood silently by or gave mealy-mouthed responses during the debate were wrong,” she said. “What people want to know now is where they stand on this fundamental issue of voting rights.”
Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, made a similar declaration, saying he opposed Biden’s call for the MLB to boycott but blamed the Republican Party for the boycott itself.
“The leadership of Georgia’s Republican Party is out of control and Georgia is hemorrhaging business and jobs because of their disastrous new Jim Crow voting law,” he said in a statement. “The Governor and the legislature are deliberately making it harder for Black voters to vote. They know it. Everybody knows it and this egregious and immoral assault on voting rights has also put our state’s economy at grave risk.”
However, Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, told CNN’s Jake Tapper a boycott against Georgia was a good thing.
“We know that boycotts have allowed for justice to be delivered in many spaces. The civil rights movement was rooted in boycotts. We know that, you know, apartheid ended in South Africa because of boycotts,” she said. “And so, our hope is that, you know, this boycott would result in changes in the law because we understand that when you restrict people’s ability to vote, you create a democracy that isn’t fully functioning for all of us. And if we are to continue to be a beacon of hope for all democracies around the world, we must stand our ground.”
Georgia Republicans hit back at Democrats, calling the accusations about the new election law “partisan politics” and “myth.”
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“They’re putting partisan politics, myths, misinformation, outright lies ahead of the economic well-being of the people of Cobb County, including minority business owners who are going to stand to lose millions of dollars in potential revenue across the county, especially coming out right of COVID-19, where a lot of them are struggling just to get through,” Cobb County Republican Chairman Jason Shepherd told the Washington Examiner.
Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer slammed MLB Commissioner Robert D. Manfred, Jr. for his decision to move the All-Star Game, saying in a statement, “From their offices in New York, a place with some of the most restrictive absentee and early voting ballot laws in the country, Major League Baseball has announced that they are moving the upcoming All-Star Game to another location to be determined.”
Shafer added, “New York has half as many early voting days as Georgia and prohibits ‘no excuse’ absentee voting. This decision by Major League Baseball is uninformed, hypocritical and pandering.”
