Republicans aren’t immune to this awakening.
DeAnna Harris was recently elected chair of the Cobb County Young Republicans, the first Black person in the post. To highlight local Black Republicans — the district attorney, deputy sheriff, a former state representative — she held her inaugural event at the historic African American church she attends. The crowd was diverse, she said, and she was proud of that.
She tries to make a conservative pitch to other Black voters by touting the ideals she believes in: small government, gun rights, religious freedom, anti-abortion. The response is generally something along the lines of, “but I don’t like Trump.”
“He’s never served the role of politician, who gets up there and smiles and says all the right things and winks at the camera, and then when you turn around they stab you in the back,” Harris said. Though she doesn’t like his tone or his tweets, she supports Trump because of his conservative policies.
But she also believes it’s imperative that Republicans broaden their base. The party should look like America, she thinks, and right now it doesn’t.
The Democratic Party of Georgia is confident that enthusiasm is on its side. Fair Fight Action, the organization Abrams founded, calculated that Georgia has more than 750,000 new voters who were not registered in 2018, 49% of them voters of color. And despite a pandemic and hourslong lines in some polling places, more Democrats voted in June’s presidential primary than in 2008, when Obama was on the ticket.
That Democratic energy can be particularly seen in these northern Atlanta suburbs. McBath, the incumbent in the 6th Congressional District, ran unopposed and got 26,000 more primary votes than the five Republicans candidates combined. In Cobb County, almost 33,000 African Americans voted in the 2016 primary. In the 2020 primary: more than 52,000. Both of the state’s Republican senators are up for election, putting Georgia on the front lines of the fight for control of the Senate.
“The 2020 election cycle is going to be key to changing the course of history in this country,” said Nikema Williams, chair of the Democratic Party of Georgia, who was selected to replace Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights leader who died in July, on the November ballot. “We’re a battleground in Georgia now, and Black women are leading the way.”
In Cobb County, even some who can’t vote themselves are determined to thwart Trump’s chances of reelection. Gabby Bashizi was one of thousands of teenagers who plotted on the social media site TikTok to reserve tickets to Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, then not show up.
Trump said he expected a million fans to attend. There were about 6,000, and lots of empty seats.
“I think he’s really dangerous,” said Bashizi, 17. Her father is an immigrant from Congo, so it feels personal every time Trump calls immigrants criminals or Black Lives Matter protesters “thugs.” “We all feel it. We all go home scared. Is it going to be me next?”
When she was younger she struggled to find self-worth. No Disney princesses looked like her. People touched her hair, like it was a strange curiosity. In the sixth grade, she buzzed it to the width of a bottle cap, and cried and cried.
Then she started seeing Black women ascend.
“Seeing them fight their fight on the national stage has led me to be able to fight my fight on a personal level,” she said. She grew her hair out again.
Charisse Davis said that it is these young women who give her hope for a better day: They are idealistic, coming of age in a time when Black women are rising, and they can look around, see people like themselves and believe anything is possible.
She knows an 18-year-old named Audrey McNeal. McNeal ran to be the class president at her mostly white high school, and lost. She thought of a poem she once wrote about a princess envious of her brother because one day he would be king; she wanted to be powerful. She ran again, and won.
“It’s about time we represent ourselves,” McNeal said. Now she’s a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. She’s heading to Barnard College to study politics.
She thinks she’ll be secretary of state one day. And then, maybe, president.
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Associated Press writers Angeliki Kastanis, Josh Boak, Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.