Let us suppose that President Donald Trump's weekend demand that four congresswomen of color "go back" to their home countries – never mind that three are American natives – is part of a premeditated 2020 re-election strategy.
And that his rant fits hand-in-glove with a tough-on-immigration policy aimed at GOP base voters who think that those who cross the U.S. border without permission deserve their discomfort.
There is a market for those ballots, but chasing them carries a price. In Georgia, the cost of Trump's rhetoric could be the suburbs of Atlanta -- in particular, the Sixth and Seventh District congressional contests. Consider these paragraphs in today's Washington Post on Trump's "white identity" strategy:
Trump won the 2016 election with the help of blue-collar white voters, some of them longtime Democrats, who are more conservative on immigration and more likely to embrace racial solidarity. Two years later, the 2018 midterm election showed suburban and college-educated whites recoiling at the same policies and statements, propelling Democrats to recapture control of the House.
"Trump is proposing a giant swap: Republicans can no longer count on suburban women and we will continue to lose college-educated men and women, while we increasingly pick up working white Americans without college degrees," said Ari Fleischer, who was a White House press secretary for President George W. Bush and who has spoken with Trump campaign advisers about their strategy for increasing turnout.
"Nobody knows who will come out ahead in the swap," he added. "That's what the campaign will tell us."
Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Brian Kemp’s subsequent victory in 2018 race for governor show that it will be possible to win Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in 2020 without winning metro Atlanta.
But last year’s gubernatorial race also demonstrated that language used to ramp up votes in rural Georgia – far milder than what Trump cut loose this weekend -- turned off voters in north metro Atlanta.
As we've mentioned before, the Sixth District that's now in the hands of Democrat Lucy McBath has one of the highest concentrations of college-educated voters in the nation. They have been defecting the GOP in droves, and are something that must be won back.
And the Seventh, which U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Lawrenceville, is giving up, probably has the highest concentration of foreign-born U.S. citizens in the state. “Go back to where you came from” is a phrase that resonates with them, and not in a good way.
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There was plenty of air between Georgia's two U.S. senators when it came to President Trump's weekend of volatile Tweets:
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson said Trump's comments were "totally inappropriate" and declined to defend them.
"I wasn't elected to make excuses or explain the statements of somebody else, and so I'm just not going to do that," said three-term Republican, who sharply criticized the president for dishonoring the late John McCain earlier this year.
Isakson's Senate colleague, David Perdue, said it was "outrageous" to consider Trump's comments racist.
WSB Radio's Jamie Dupree, by the way, has sent us this link to the proposed U.S. House resolution condemning the president's remarks, which could come to a vote as early as today.
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Former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn has renewed his endorsement of Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux in the Seventh District congressional race. Nunn backed the Georgia State professor during her initial bid for the Forsyth and Gwinnett-based seat last year, and said yesterday that Bourdeaux has "laid a solid foundation" for her 2020 campaign, citing her work on health care, education and job training.
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Speaking of the Seventh District race, we came across a familiar name as we perused the latest campaign finance filings. Democrat Rashid Malik of Lawrenceville, the former president of a medical trade school, unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Rob Woodall in 2016, and recentlyfiled paperwork to run again in 2020. His campaign website isn't operational yet and we couldn't find much of a footprint online. But since Malik last ran for Congress, headmitted to paying bribes to boost enrollment and tuition income at his Chamblee-based school, which was eventually shut down in 2017.
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Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms will be back on Capitol Hill this week, testifying about the city's plans for combating climate change. But
unlike last month, when the Democratspoke to a bipartisan House committee about the city's recent cyberattack, she'll be testifying before an unofficial panel composed only of Senate Democrats. Bottoms will be joined by her counterparts from Honolulu, Saint Paul, Pittsburgh and Portland, Ore.
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Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico has filed paperwork to explore a U.S. Senate bid against Republican incumbent David Perdue, allowing her to start raising money. She's long been seen as a likely candidate for the race, and has already lined up strategists and operatives. Read more here.
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Keith Mason, former chief of staff to Gov. Zell Miller, has pointed us to an excellent Slate article on President Jimmy Carter's unprecedented effort to diversify the federal judiciary. It's something that President Donald Trump is undoing – given that Carter's appointees are now aging out. A taste:
It's hard to overstate just how uniform the federal judiciary was as Carter took office. Less than 2 percent of Gerald Ford's nominees had been women and less than 10 percent nonwhite. Before that, less than 1 percent of Richard Nixon's nominees had been women and 4 percent nonwhite. For Carter, ensuring that 15 percent of his nominees were women and 22 percent nonwhite was not just a dramatic change—he had to overcome institutional obstacles, racism, and sexism to make it happen.
Another thing: Carter never nominated a U.S. Supreme Court justice in his single term as president, but he did introduce Ruth Bader Ginsburg into the federal judiciary.
