John Jefferson
Atlanta is, from time to time, the center of the political universe.
It is also home to all things evil and villainous, a festering cesspool of lurid crime, a “shooting gallery” in the words of Donald Trump, spoken in the vile confines of a brand new college basketball arena amid the unspeakable horrors of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with a microbrewery.
Conservatives stoking fear of big cities would be a joke, if not for the damage it does.
In May, the FBI arrested Mark Adams Prieto, a 58-year-old gun show dealer from Prescott, Arizona, on firearms trafficking charges. Prieto had been on the way to Atlanta at the time, according to court documents, because he planned to kill as many Black people as he could at a Bad Bunny concert while planting Confederate flags and shouting white power slogans, to provoke a race war ahead of the 2024 election.
“The reason I say Atlanta,” Prieto allegedly told an informant working with the FBI, “Why, why is Georgia such a fucked-up state now? When I was a kid that was one of the most conservative states in the country. Why is it not now? Because as the crime got worse in LA, St Louis and all these other cities, all the n****** moved out of those [places] and moved to Atlanta.”
Prieto is a product of decades of Republican fearmongering, not just about Atlanta, but about big cities across the country. This is the message that Tucker Carlson and other conservative pundits have been pushing for years about San Francisco, New York and Detroit – it’s exactly the same way conservatives amped up their rhetorical combat on Chicago in the wake of Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House 16 years ago.
It’s not because of crime. Cities in every country have long had more crime than their suburban counterparts, simply because it’s easier to commit a crime in a city, and it has largely trended downward. It’s because Democrats – often Black Democrats – control most big city governments, and they help national politicians win. Joe Biden won 85% of San Francisco’s votes in 2020. He also won 83% of Chicago, 77% of Los Angeles and 76% of New York City.
As a result, conservative state governments are cauterizing upstart municipalities, burning any pretense of respect for small-D democracy at the local level in the process. They fear those blue dots will bleed enough Black political power into red states to turn them purple and cost them the White House, not just in 2024, but permanently.
Race is at the center of the fear.
“Any mayor, county judge that was dumb-ass enough to come meet with me, I told them with great clarity, my goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the legislature for cities and counties.”
That’s former Texas House speaker Dennis Bonnen, in a conversation recorded with another legislator leaked to the Texas Tribune in 2019.
In response to Austin legislation requiring water breaks for construction workers in the punishing Texas heat, the Republican-controlled legislature in 2023 passed what progressives call the “Death Star” bill. The law in effect ends the practice of home rule in Texas governments – a legal principle enshrined in the Texas constitution and that of many states – giving cities broad autonomy to create local laws, as long as those laws do not conflict with state or federal law.
House Bill 2127 takes that power away from cities in a swath of policy areas, from managing climate change to labor law. The law is in legal limbo today. But the damage is already being done to municipal leaders, who are frozen in place waiting for the case to be resolved.
This story is playing out across the country, with red state governments seeing big blue cities as launching places for progressive ideas.
In the wake of the deadly police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, the city government created a police review board. Tennessee’s conservative legislature promptly passed a law banning such boards. Nashville’s response to the Covenant school shooting led to protesters in and outside the state capitol. The legislature responded with an attempt to cut Nashville’s elected metro council in half and threatened takeovers of the city’s sports and airport authority boards.
Florida has blocked its cities from passing LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination ordinances, from regulating pit bulls, from making socially conscious investments, and from passing local zoning laws around “missing middle” housing and building construction. Florida’s famous “don’t say gay” bill mandates local school boards to provide politically vetted instructional materials.
On top of all of this, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, signed Senate Bill 170 into law last July with almost no national media commentary. The law, with some exceptions for budgeting, automatically enjoins Florida cities from enforcing a municipal ordinance if that ordinance is being challenged in court, and awards court costs to challengers if they win.
In Jackson, Mississippi, lawmakers ostensibly concerned about crime attempted to create an entirely new court system, supplanting elected judges in Hinds county with appointees of the Republican chief judge.
“No one could tell us why do we need this bill?” said Judge Winston Kidd. “The only thing I could go back to was the fact that all four circuit judges are African American, and in no other jurisdiction in this state had they tried something of that nature.”
And, of course, there’s Atlanta.
A few years ago, legislators began looking at ways to curb the power of locally elected district attorneys after the prosecutor in Athens-Clarke county decided to stop charging people for petty drug offenses. The failure of a different local prosecutor – Brunswick county’s Jackie Johnson – to charge the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery threw the question into sharp relief.
But lawmakers are now pivoting this legislation toward the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, who is prosecuting Trump and 18 others for interfering with the 2020 election.
“If the inmates are running the asylum here, then we maybe ought to be stepping in here, and that’s the role of this committee, to recommend if we need uniform state laws and ethical boundaries,” said Bill Cowsert, a Georgia state senator and chairman of the committee, at a meeting in August.
“Madam DA in Fulton county says she ain’t got to do what Fulton county tells her to do, with whistleblowers, with treatment of employees or anything because she is a constitutional officer and she can set her own durn policies.”
The prospect of a Black Democrat empowered to hold white conservatives accountable to the law, without being accountable to white conservatives in return, is the political dragon to be slain. Willis has refused demands to testify before the state senate committee, describing it as an interference in her prosecution.
Houston is the fourth-largest city in the United States and the nation’s most diverse. In Karl Rove’s heyday, it voted for Republicans.
Now Harris county, where Houston sits, leans Democratic. About 44% of Harris county residents are Latino. About 19% are Black, and about 7% are Asian. Less than 30% of Harris county is non-Hispanic and white. “There’s values coming out of blue cities and places like Houston, where we love the fact that we’re so diverse,” said Nicole Pedersen, the county’s Democratic party elections director. “We love our restaurants and different cultures. I think there’s a fear of that.”
Biden won Harris county, where Houston is located, by about 218,000 votes in 2020, while losing Texas 52-46 by about 630,000 votes. Pedersen estimates that Harris county needs to turn out about 1.1 million Democratic voters to flip the state.
Is Harris county getting there? Hard to tell. Beto O’Rourke’s Senate run in 2018 started a clock ticking. O’Rourke lost that race by fewer than three points, the closest US Senate contest in Texas in a generation. But as they say in Texas, just because a chicken’s got wings don’t mean it can fly.
Nonetheless, Texas Republicans recognize the existential threat to one-party rule presented by Harris county. Two years ago, Republicans passed legislation to allow the state to take over elections in Harris county – and only Harris county – in the event of problems with an election.
“The problems that were listed are the kinds of things that happen in every single election,” Pedersen said. “Our county is as big as half the states. We have these massive elections … of course, things are going to go wrong, equipment is going to break, there’s going to be things that just happen.”
“The law is written in such a way that they can take advantage of that and come in kind of whenever they want.”
A state takeover of the election’s office doesn’t necessarily mean that someone new will suppress Democratic votes. But it’s telling that the Republican effort to convert voters of color in Harris county, one of the most diverse counties in the United States, does not appear to be a priority.
It’s not personal to Republicans necessarily, Doyle said. It’s just math. “They’d like to erase Harris county voters from the map, and then they’ll win forever,” Doyle said.
Republicans have been able to make gains among Latino voters, particularly those along the southern border, with appeals to patriotism, faith and safety.
But the largely unspoken corollary is that Republicans – despite all effort to the contrary – cannot expect to win over voters of color in big cities in sufficient numbers to blunt the demographic impact of their increase in the electorate.
After all, it’s hard to win over people who live in cities when Republicans’ primary political argument is that conservative voters have to be protected from people who live in cities.
Why would Trump trash a city like Milwaukee – or Atlanta, for that matter – in a swing state in an election year? Because those cities cost him those states in 2020.
On the podium on a fateful 6 January 2021, speaking to a group of supporters who would eventually become a riot storming the Capitol, Trump intoned a litany of grievances with no regard for evidence and repeating debunked claims from these cities. Trump said Fulton county in Georgia was “corrupt” and had stuffed machines with fake votes. Detroit had “139%” turnout – a lie – after canvassers were “re-scanning batches of ballots over and over again” – another lie.
The grievance lives on.
When Trump was speaking in Atlanta’s Summerhill neighborhood in August, he described Atlanta as “like a killing field”, referencing a recent high-profile murder downtown. When Congressman John Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Trump suggested by tweet that the city was “crime infested” and that Lewis “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart”.
Trump refused to observe Lewis’s death with dignity as a revered civil rights icon. He instead attacked Lewis’s legacy, telling a reporter he “couldn’t say one way or another” whether Lewis was worthy of praise, complaining again about being snubbed at the inauguration and musing about how the Civil Rights Act had “worked out” for Black voters.
Atlantans have not forgotten these insults. Fulton and DeKalb counties – Atlanta’s core – delivered a net gain of about 140,000 votes for Biden in 2020. Overall turnout in Georgia increased by about 20% four years ago; in these counties, Democratic turnout increased by about 32%. Lewis’s name was on their lips as they stood in line to vote.
The Trump campaign had been trying to coax Black voters into their camp, with events like the launch of his Black voter coalition group at a historically Black church in Detroit in June. Even then, in an audience packed with almost exclusively white supporters, he once again railed against cities and crime.
“Look, the crime is most rampant right here and in African American communities,” Trump said at 180 Church in Detroit. “More people see me and they say, ‘Sir, we want protection. We want police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed and mugged and beat up or killed.’”
Between the rise of Kamala Harris after Biden’s withdrawal and the pratfall of comments about “Black jobs”, in front of a group of Black journalists, Trump has begun abandoning the pretense of cross-racial outreach in favor of railing against “sanctuary cities”. Over the last few weeks, he has made a tour of sundown towns – communities that would terrorize Black people caught within the city limits after sundown – on the campaign trail.
Trump, trying to counter-program against the Democratic national convention, made a campaign stop in August to Howell, Michigan, a city 40 miles (64km) west of Detroit with historical ties to the Ku Klux Klan. Even there, he unloaded on cities.
“Cities. I will say this. The top 25: almost all are run by Democrats. And they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread,” he said. “You get shot. You get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be. And you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it and it’s time for a change. We have to bring back our cities. We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in them. They’re fleeing the cities of our country.”
But it might be Trump’s commentary about Milwaukee in July that truly makes the point. In a closed-door meeting with conservative leaders ahead of the Republican national convention there, he called it a “horrible city”.
His comment left people wondering what could be so horrible about Milwaukee, a city filled with people who by and large are known for avoiding offense. Crime? Traffic? Bad schools? High costs? Homelessness? Liberals?
Mostly, it’s about a place with people who cost him an election. “I only like people who like me,” he has said.
Mayor Cavalier Johnson shot back, Milwaukee-style.
“Donald Trump was talking about things that he thinks are horrible. All of us lived through his presidency. So, right back at you, buddy,’”
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