ANALYSIS
Georgia just elected a governor who didn’t need rural Georgia to win. That may turn out to be the most important fact about this election, more important than the size of Keisha Lance Bottoms’ margin or how badly the polls missed it. The question now is what her victory means for rural Georgia, and for any state policy that hopes to address its problems.
A widening gap, even in a wave
Every county in Georgia moved toward the Democrats this year, rural counties included. But they didn’t move equally. The exurban counties on Atlanta’s edge and the state’s small-city counties moved half again as much as rural Georgia did. Four years ago, the exurbs voted almost exactly like rural Georgia. Now they vote a lot more like metro Atlanta.
So the line between the two Georgias isn’t disappearing. It’s moving. The growing, diversifying, better-educated places around Atlanta are drifting into Atlanna’s orbit, politically as well as economically. Rural Georgia, the part of the state I’ve written about on my blog, Trouble in God’s Country, for more than 15 years, is being left smaller, older and more isolated than ever.
And it just watched a governor get elected without it.
Crawfordville
Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first woman and the first Black Georgian elected governor. She has spent her career in Atlanta. She won by running up enormous margins in metro Atlanta and the suburbs. Politically, she owes rural Georgia very little.
But there was a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution the day after the election worth reading. The day before the election, Bottoms drove about 90 miles east of Atlanta to Crawfordville, the seat of Taliaferro County, the least populous county in Georgia. Her great-great-grandparents were enslaved there. She spoke to about 100 people, a far cry from the crowds she’d been drawing in Atlanta, and then she knelt at her great-great-grandmother’s grave and wept.
Taliaferro County is about as Notlanna as Notlanna gets. It’s tiny, it’s poor, and like most of rural Georgia it has been losing people for generations. Bottoms’ family left for Atlanta in a horse and buggy. Millions of rural Georgians, Black and white, have made some version of that trip since.
The question is whether she governs like someone who remembers that trip.
The opening
Bottoms can read the results in one of two ways. She can conclude that Democrats don’t need rural Georgia and govern accordingly. Or she can notice that rural Georgia moved toward her, too, by about 13 points, and treat that as an opening.
I’d urge the latter, for reasons that are both moral and practical. Rural Georgia’s problems don’t stay in rural Georgia. Its collapsing hospitals send patients to Atlanta’s emergency rooms. Its failing schools send underprepared workers to Atlanta’s job market. And a governor who wants to be more than a one-term novelty will need more than metro Atlanta behind her.
Republicans have governed this state for more than two decades on the strength of rural votes, and rural Georgia has been in decline for the whole time. Bottoms has a chance to make the case that Democrats will actually show up. That case would start with things rural Georgians can see:
• Health care first. Rural hospitals are the clearest marker of rural decline, and the lack of a full Medicaid expansion is part of why so many have struggled. Expansion needs the legislature’s approval, so she’ll have to fight for it, while putting money behind clinics, emergency care and doctors for the places that have already lost their hospitals.
• Regional hub cities. Places like Macon, Columbus, Albany and Augusta anchor the rural counties around them. If they keep losing ground, the countryside goes with them. Strengthening those hubs is probably the most efficient way to help the most rural Georgians.
• Economic development that reaches rural Georgia. Georgia doesn’t spend millions luring industry. It spends billions. Those deals matter, and the jobs they bring are real. But they almost always land near interstates, ports and metro labor pools. Meanwhile, much of rural Georgia keeps sliding deeper into a socioeconomic abyss: fewer jobs, fewer people, lower incomes, sicker residents. A state that can find billions for a handful of big plants can find real money for the places those plants will never go, starting with the schools, clinics and broadband any community needs before an employer will even look at it.
The hard part
This is where I have to be blunt. Doing right by rural Georgia will require decisions that almost certainly won’t be popular, in rural Georgia or anywhere else.
It will mean spending money generated in metro Atlanta on places that didn’t vote for her, and explaining that to the voters who did.
It will mean admitting that the state can’t save every county. Georgia has 159 of them, more than any state but Texas. Many are too small to sustain a hospital, a school system or even a full county government. Consolidating government services and school systems, and erasing county lines, has long been the third rail of rural Georgia politics. But spreading thin resources across 147 counties has been tried for decades, and it hasn’t worked.
It will mean focusing on people as well as places. Some rural communities will keep shrinking no matter what Atlanta does. Helping the people who live there get educated, get healthy and get to opportunity should be the priority, not propping up the failing towns and counties they live in.
That raises a question I’ve thought about for years but never written about: Is a governor’s first duty to Georgia’s places, or to the Georgians who live in them? When a county can no longer keep a hospital open, run a decent school system or balance its books, its residents are still Georgia citizens, and their kids are still Georgia’s kids. At some point, the state has to decide whether local control is protecting those people or abandoning them, and whether to step in. I don’t know exactly where that point is. But I’m fairly sure Georgia has passed it in more than a few places.
None of that is likely to win votes. All of it is what it would take to start closing the gap and writing the final chapters of the Two Georgias story.
Bottoms knelt at a grave in Crawfordville the day before the election. Her critics will say it was just another campaign stop. I’d like to think it was the start of a commitment.
Charlie Hayslett is a long-retired political journalist and public relations executive who has been researching and writing about the cost and consequences of the decline of rural Georgia for more than 15 years. His latest work appears at https://charliehayslett.substack.com/
