FORT VALLEY — Christina Deas was in her flower shop on Main Street here a few days before Easter. As she meticulously arranged a small woven basket of daisy mums, a reporter dropped in and asked about the looming presidential election.
Like many of her neighbors and fellow Peach County voters, she wasn’t much for talking politics with a stranger. Even so, she was cordial. In much the way she carefully placed floral stems in a bouquet, she traipsed ever-delicately on the topic at hand.
“The biggest thing for me is a fair election,” she said. “That’s it. I just want to make sure the election is fair. I’m not a fan of negative and slanderous campaigning. … Be truthful, be open and honest. The people will go on that. If that doesn’t win you the election, then you weren’t meant to win.”
Deas, 45, is a Tallahassee, Florida, native and a Florida State University graduate with a degree in criminology. She has worked as a mental health counselor in the prison system and in private practice after moving to Peach County with her husband two decades ago.
She has settled into her Middle Georgia home county enough to know that its political scene is, as she put it, “pretty much split.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The county of 29,000 people, about 51% of them white and 45% of them Black, has been something of a bellwether when it comes to the presidency.
In the past 10 presidential elections, dating to Ronald Reagan’s successful 1984 bid for a second term, the voting majority in Peach County has six times selected the candidate who went on to win the White House.
But more recently, Peach County voters have chosen the winners of four of the past five presidential elections. The exception came in 2020 when 6,506 Peach Countians voted for Donald Trump, who lost, and 5,922 voted for Joe Biden, who won.
Most remarkably, over the past 40 years in Peach County, 42,583 ballots here have been cast for the Democratic candidates for president, while 42,240 have gone to Republican candidates — a difference of 343 votes.
“It’s a county that’s divided,” Deas said.
Some of the issues important to Deas: health care, a woman’s right to an abortion and education.
After COVID-19 hit, as a side business, she opened her shop, the Greenery Floral & Tuxedo Place, in downtown Fort Valley.
For her, jobs are another concern, and, to a degree, the economy.
“The presidents do what they can do,” Deas said. “But the president doesn’t own all the businesses in the U.S.”
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Peach County is Georgia’s newest county, established 100 years ago, shorn from neighboring Houston and Macon counties. The Blue Bird Corp., a cheerily named vehicle manufacturer famous for its school buses, was founded in Fort Valley, the county seat, in 1932. Today, the company has more than 2,000 workers and, along with Fort Valley State University and some area peach-growing enterprises, is among the county’s largest employers.
Wade Yoder, a county commissioner who for a living operates a handful of businesses, including a portable- and storage-building outfit, said the economy and inflation are among the issues on locals’ minds.
He said that, despite being more or less split down the middle on presidential politics, people are for the most part united on hometown matters.
“Everybody seems to genuinely like each other with a spirit of working together,” Yoder said.
Credit: Joe Kovac/AJC
Credit: Joe Kovac/AJC
On a bright spring morning in the heart of Byron, a town of about 6,000 and the county’s second-largest municipality, Mickey Walker was out for a stroll.
Walker, 77, moved to her home overlooking a rail line just west of I-75 in the early 1970s. Thanks in part to explosive growth in nearby Warner Robins, Byron has roughly quadrupled in size since she arrived.
For her, key issues this fall include “what they’re teaching the children,” immigration, rising prices and freedom of speech. She worries the federal government “ruined the people during the pandemic by giving them so much money that they didn’t have to work.”
At election time for the past 20 years, Walker has worked as a poll manager. She wonders how enthusiastic voters will be this time around.
“So many people seem to have lost interest in voting,” Walker said. “And whether you like my candidate or your candidate, whoever you vote for, come and vote. I mean, that’s one right you have and you ought to take advantage of it.”
