FORT VALLEY — Retired teacher Kay Morrill was raised here in the heart of Georgia peach country.
She was the fourth of five children — born to a Baptist schoolteacher mother from nearby Sumter County, Jimmy Carter’s home. Her father — a Catholic from Donalsonville, in deeper southwest Georgia — migrated to Fort Valley for a career at Woolfolk Chemical Works.
Morrill married a Texan, a Navy man who went on to work in medical technology and, more recently, as a local GOP organizer.
For about 30 years, she taught kindergarten and elementary school. She believes certain professions require higher standards, ethically and morally — preachers and teachers among them. Presidents, too.
With November’s election looming, she finds herself in a quandary. She doesn’t consider Joe Biden or Donald Trump fit for the White House.
“It makes me sick that we have who we have,” Morrill, 65, said of the candidates. “I get to vote for someone who is ruining our country or a convicted felon. I don’t like either choice.”
She could almost see herself voting for someone she considers a moderate Democrat. But she thinks Democrats skew so far left “they don’t represent the mainstream, old-school Democrats.”
In all likelihood, she will cast her ballot for Trump for a third time.
“I held my nose and voted for him,” she said. “Now I may actually throw up doing it.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Here in Peach County, home to about 29,000 people, Trump edged Biden in the last election by fewer than 600 votes. But in Fort Valley, where Morrill lives, Trump received just 30% of the vote.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which Morrill believes Trump incited, she never imagined being faced with voting for him again.
“I think he’s a narcissist, and it grieves me to even think I’m going to cast a vote for him,” she said. “The only way I can do it and feel any comfort is if he chooses wisely a vice president, and I can pray (Trump) goes to jail or something.”
She hopes Trump chooses Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, as his running mate but doubts he will. If he does, she explained, “I could go in there and say, ‘I’m voting for Nikki Haley.’ ”
But if Trump’s VP pick is, in her eyes, unpalatable, Morrill may well write in Haley for president.
She mentions three G’s of election politics — groceries, gas and grandchildren — and how she senses “we were better off” economically when Trump was president. She bemoans the high price of butter. “I bake a lot,” said Morrill, the mother of two adult sons. “The price of just going to the grocery store anymore is horrendous.”
Morrill missed seeing the June 27 presidential debate. She fell asleep. But she woke in time to watch CNN’s coverage of the aftermath. Biden’s disjointed responses and, at times, confused appearance left some calling for him to withdraw his candidacy.
“My gut reaction is, ‘Shame on his family for allowing him to continue on.’ My heart just hurts for him,” she said. “I think I probably felt sadder for our country that day because I just felt like, you know, neither one of them is a good choice.”
Her greatest fear? Biden winning, then not completing his term, making Vice President Kamala Harris the president. It is a prospect Morrill views as “even more frightening than Biden.”
Not that some of Trump’s supporters don’t give Morrill pause. She attended a Republican gathering one night. There were, as she puts it, “a bunch of MAGAs” in attendance.
They were discussing how they wanted to sign something with the closing phrase “Your Fellow Patriot.” Morrill chimed in that she didn’t want to be referred to as a patriot, at least not in the way they implied.
“They looked at me like I had just thrown hot coffee in their face,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Well, you know, it used to be a patriot meant you had respect for your country and love for your country. And now, to me, y’all call the patriots the people that did January the 6th. A patriot doesn’t act like that.”
Morrill and her husband live in the town’s historic district, about a block and a half from the county courthouse. Oaks and pines shade lanes that are home to some of rural Middle Georgia’s stateliest houses. A columned, fortresslike dwelling being renovated across from the Morrill place was built in 1848.
On a recent afternoon, in the living room of their century-old home, the Morrills were talking about presidential politics with a reporter. The conversation turned to how voters contend with their candidate’s shortcomings.
Tom Morrill, 67, recalled a trip that he and Kay made to Europe during Trump’s time in office. While touring an Austrian winery, they found themselves entangled in an uncomfortable back-and-forth that they did not start.
A man on their tour, a fellow they think was from Belgium, piped up, “Trump is an idiot.”
“Yes,” Tom said to the guy, “but he’s our idiot.”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
