MACON, Ga. (AP) — Sabrina Friday scanned the room at Mother's Nest, an organization in Macon that provides baby supplies, training, food and housing to mothers in need, and she asked how many planned to vote. Of the 30, mostly women, six raised their hands.
Friday, the group's executive director, said she tries to stress civic duty, an often difficult proposition given the circumstances of her clients.
“When a mom is in a hotel room and there’s six or seven people in two beds and her kids are hungry and she just lost the car, she doesn’t want to hear too much about elections,” Friday said. “She wants to hear how you can help.”
Macon is the largest city in Bibb County, where the majority of residents are Black and one in four of its population lives in poverty. When Joe Biden became president four years ago, he promised to tackle the pernicious gap in racial equity — and in few places is the stubbornness of that challenge as politically significant in this state that could swing the presidential election.
Located about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Atlanta, Bibb County is the kind of place where Vice President Kamala Harris would need to run up her margin in order to defeat Donald Trump in this year's election, a strategy that helped Biden win the state four years ago as he promised to lift up Black Americans. It won't be easy: Bibb County never recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic, and Labor Department data show it had more jobs in 2019 under Trump than it does now.
Trump, the former president, sees himself as having an opportunity with Black voters, particularly men. But he and Harris have one thing in common: Each will have a difficult time persuading people to turn out who typically sit out elections. More than 47,000 people in Bibb County were eligible to vote in 2020 and didn't, a figure roughly four times Biden's margin of victory across the entire state. Eligible voters are defined as legal residents who are 18 or older, according to Census figures.
The Biden-Harris administration can claim to have addressed three of the four crises it pledged to fix. The pandemic largely receded three years ago, the economy has improved and there is a genuine commitment of several hundreds of billions of federal dollars to tackle climate change. But racial inequality — as measured by the Federal Reserve — has worsened.
At Mother's Nest, Linda Solomon, 58, said she and her daughter aren’t voting “ because nothing changes " no matter who sits in the White House. “Why you gonna vote and ain’t nobody doing nothing?”
While Harris has excited Black voters in and around Atlanta, with its wealthier and better-educated electorate, interviews in Bibb County suggest voters living in far worse circumstances are not moved by the historic nature of her candidacy. Democrats won the county by a 2-1 margin in 2020, and Republicans are increasingly confident they can erode Democrats' historic advantage of winning roughly 90% of all Black votes.
Janiyah Thomas, Black media director for the Trump campaign, said in an email exchange that “Black voters in rural America hold the key to America’s future, and President Trump is the only candidate who has proven he can deliver real results.”
Thomas said Black unemployment hit historic lows during Trump’s first term, although it ultimately hit a record low of 4.8% in April 2023 under Biden. But the Black unemployment rate is now at 5.6%, more than two percentage points higher than the unemployment rate for white workers and higher than the rate for Asian and Hispanic workers.
Thomas said get-out-the-vote efforts are focused on low-propensity voters, adding that they are using traditional canvassing methods as well as TikTok and outside groups. She estimated the efforts will reach 15 million doors across the battlegrounds.
The Harris campaign is relying on having staff on the ground. It has six people in its Macon office and has been canvassing across the region, including lower-income and rural areas. The campaign believes lower-income voters receive most of their news and information on mobile devices and can be reached by its $200 million digital ad push.
While campaigning, Harris has focused on the middle class, and she has offered plans for small businesses and home buyers.
In places like Macon, that could prove a difficult sale. The clients at Mother’s Nest are not business owners or homebuyers anytime soon, and even Harris’ plan to take on grocery chains for price gouging doesn’t resonate with a population living in food deserts.
The outlook of those patrons falls in line with other Black registered voters. They have an overwhelmingly positive view of Harris, but only about half of them believe the outcome of this presidential election will have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of impact on them personally, according to a recent poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
But the more nonurban parts of Georgia are only part of the electoral puzzle. It’s a dramatically different story in Atlanta and its vote-rich suburbs where enthusiasm runs high for both Harris and Trump, although often divided by race.
A viewing party of the presidential debate drew scores of well-to-do residents to Buckhead Art & Company in an affluent uptown neighborhood. Many of the dozens of attendees, including the owner and hostess, Karimah McFarlane, were part of the Howard University graduate network. The party had a panel discussion that urged attendees to focus their efforts on getting young Black men to vote. The first thing every guest encountered was the voter registration table, complete with information on Georgia's system and various deadlines.
McFarlane explained that Atlanta has attracted small business owners and others because of the business-friendly atmosphere. What can be less friendly is the voting system, with some newcomers particularly puzzled by how to vote absentee.
Across town, a voter registration drive at Spelman College targeted first-time voters. Hosted by the members of Harris' sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and their Alpha Phi Alpha brothers from Morehouse College, the event began drawing would-be registrants an hour before sign-ups started. At its peak, dozens of students crowded the tables set up outside the student union and bookstore. The organizations could not campaign for, or endorse Harris, but students spoke freely.
Caleb Cage, 21, a religion major at Morehouse, said he'd seen the excitement rise for the vice president “especially among people in my particular demographic, young people.” Cage is voting absentee in his home state of Maryland.
He said he had heard about young Black men taking their support to Trump and his response was to remember what the vote means. "To reiterate the sentiments of our Morehouse brother, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a vote is a prayer for the future world you want to see. That’s extremely important for young people.”
But, even on a storied historically Black college campus, there was an awareness that the messages that are invigorating college students might not hit others. Elise Sampson, 20, a junior political science major at Spelman and member of the sorority co-sponsoring the registration drive, said economic disparities needed to be part of the discussions.
“It comes down to an accessibility issue," she said. “When people don’t feel heard and represented, it is hard to want to participate in a political system that doesn’t hear and represent you.”
Malcolm Patterson, a 21-year-old junior finance major at Morehouse from Marietta, Georgia, was at the event to support the activity, adding he was already registered.
“This is my first presidential election,” Patterson said. "It’s important for us to vote on the future we hope to see,” he said.
Poor voters are hidden figures in the election
Even with 2020's record number of ballots cast, more than 75 million people eligible to vote did not cast ballots, according to a study by the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California.
AP VoteCast, a survey of both voters and nonvoters, showed that nonvoters in 2020 tended to be poorer, younger, less educated, unmarried and minorities. The data, collected by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, also found that among voters in 2020, 15% reported having a household income under $25,000 in the previous year, compared with roughly 3 in 10 nonvoters. Put those characteristics against a population of 27 million adults who live below poverty, according to the census, and the figures suggest that people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder probably make up a significant subset of all nonvoters.
Georgia was an unlikely cauldron of election turmoil
In 2020, the turnout of people eligible to vote in Georgia was 66.3%, nearly matching the national figure of 66.8%, according to the Center for Inclusive Democracy, with the lowest turnouts among Black and Latino voters.
The Republican-controlled legislature has sought changes aimed at redressing complaints fueled by Trump's false claims of voting fraud in 2020. (Trump is facing criminal charges in the state for his actions trying to overturn the result.) That includes requiring a hand count of all ballots cast, though a Georgia judge has blocked that at least for now. Another change requires homeless voters to use the address of the county voter registration office rather than where they live, which could add to the impoverished nonvoter numbers.
A microcosm of demographics and census
A majority of Bibb County's 150,000-plus residents are minorities and over 60% are unmarried. Four in 10 are younger than 30 and nearly half have a high school education or less. The poverty rate is above 25%, more than double the state and national averages.
In interviews with dozens of single moms, grandmothers and some men, it was clear that the campaigns are not addressing their problems.
Solomon came to Mother's Nest with her grown son and daughter and grandchildren. None of them vote, she said. Her son can't because of a criminal record but she and her daughter won't because, “If you ain't got nothing, nobody has time for you whether you are Black or white. If you're poor, you're poor and they ain't got time.”
Friday, who started the center in 2022, slips in comments on voting and why it's important, not just nationally but locally, where issues are decided that impact the families directly.
“You’d be surprised that a lot of them just don’t want to because they’ve given up,” she said.
Dr. Tiffany Hall hosted a dental clinic and heard the challenges of the attendees first hand, including how most can't get preventive dental care until issues become emergencies.
Tynesha Haslem, 36, listened intently. In an interview, she said she remembered voting — she believes during one of Barack Obama's elections — but voting has not been a priority in a “horrible” life.
She lost the car she had earlier this year and she and her sons spend nights in a hotel. She is not registered to vote now but even if she wanted to, it is unclear that she could because of a felony conviction on her record from 2016 for attacking an ex-boyfriend. Her top priority is getting a job “hopefully in customer service,” she said.
Nonvoters have basic, urgent needs the campaigns don't address
Cars began lining up, for more than a mile, near the Unionville Missionary Baptist Church for a food and clothing giveaway. The first flurry came in a steady flow for an hour, grabbing canned goods and other produce packaged the night before by church members.
Levita Carter, 55, was one of the church members and also a teacher in the school system. “Our children are coming to school hungry,” she said. “They don’t have sufficient food. They don’t have sufficient clothing.”
Carter's message to people using the food pantries and Mother's Nest: “Our vote counts right here. We need to start small in our town and our place and get some people in place right here that can affect change here before we can even get to voting for president."
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Associated Press writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.
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Gary Fields, The Associated Press
