For a few hours on Saturday morning, I felt good about America. I was at a smallish rally in the Atlanta suburb of Riverdale, listening to Democratic politicians including Senator Kamala Harris and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who could become the first African-American female governor in American history. Abrams told a story she often repeats on the campaign trail, about being 17 and arriving at the governor’s mansion for a reception for Georgia’s high school valedictorians.
Her family didn’t have a car, and she described getting off the bus and walking with her parents along a driveway to a set of black gates. A guard approached, and she remembered him saying, “This is a private event — you don’t belong here.”
Though they were eventually let in, Abrams recalled little of the event itself. “The only clear memory I have of that day is a man standing in front of the most powerful place in Georgia, looking at me and telling me I don’t belong,” she said. “But with your help in 10 days we will open those gates wide!” The crowd stood, applauding and cheering, as Abrams said, “Because this is our Georgia!”
When the rally was over I checked the news. Reports of the killings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh were coming in. The social media posts of the man arrested in the shootings echoed a lie being peddled by Donald Trump, Fox News and some Republican politicians, which paints a group of bedraggled migrants about a thousand miles away as a dangerous invading horde subsidized by a shadowy puppet master. The gunman’s rampage, believed to be the deadliest anti-Semitic massacre in American history, came on the heels of a bomb campaign against leading Democrats that the police say was carried out by a fanatical Trump supporter, and by what the authorities describe as the racist murder of two African-Americans in their 60s at a Kentucky supermarket.
Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. The divide feels especially stark in Georgia, where the midterm election is a battle between Trumpist reaction and the multicultural America whose emergence the right is trying, at all costs, to forestall.
“Any time there is progress made there will always be moments of retrenchment,” Abrams said to me later on Saturday. But, she added, “what I am more excited about is the counterforce that we’re seeing in the number of people running for office who represent a much more forward-looking, progressive vision.”
Abrams’s goal is to put together a coalition of African-American and other minority voters and white liberals. The potential is there; Georgia is less than 53 percent non-Hispanic white. “Georgia is a blue state if everybody votes,” DuBose Porter, chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, told me.
Abrams’s opponent, the Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp, ahead by a couple of percentage points in the polls, doesn’t want to see that happen. Last week, Rolling Stone obtained audio of Kemp telling donors of his “concern” about what might happen in Georgia “if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.” As the secretary of state overseeing his own election, he’s taken steps to make that harder. His office has frozen new voter registrations for minor discrepancies with official records, and, starting in 2012, purged around 1.5 million people from the voter rolls — some simply because they didn’t vote in previous elections. He’s fighting a court order to stop rejecting absentee ballots over questions about the authenticity of their signatures.
Kemp is the candidate of aggrieved whiteness. During the primary, he ran an ad boasting that he drives a big truck “just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.” (That would be kidnapping.) A person who claimed to be a Kemp canvasser recently wrote on the racist website VDare, “I know everything I need to know about what happens when blacks are in charge from Detroit, Haiti, South Africa, etc.” Kemp cannot be blamed for the words of his volunteers, but he’s made little discernible effort to distance himself from bigots. This month he posed for a photograph with a white nationalist fan in a T-shirt saying, “Allah is not God, and Mohammad is not his prophet.”
Racists in Georgia, like racists all over America, are emboldened. A schoolteacher in Atlanta told me that over the weekend K.K.K. fliers were strewn around his suburb.
But the forces of democracy are rising, too. In Georgia’s highly diverse Seventh District, Carolyn Bourdeaux, part of the wave of women inspired to run for office by revulsion at Trump, is challenging Representative Rob Woodall, a Republican. Bourdeaux said that the Seventh, a majority-minority district with immigrants from all over the world, has been on the front lines of voter suppression. Nevertheless, her campaign said that early-voting turnout has reached presidential levels.
On Saturday morning, Abrams closed by reminding the crowd of Kemp’s views on democracy. “He said he is concerned that if everyone eligible to vote in Georgia does so, he will lose this election,” she said. “Let’s prove him right.” In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.
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