 Georgia, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia. Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Boddy, and I am pleased to introduce a new show. It's actually a mini series, All Eyes on Georgia. We're going to be looking at the crucial runoff Senate election that's coming up January 5th in the great state of Georgia. I was actually, mentally, to get through election season was saying that the Reagan era would end in 2020 with Donald Trump's loss. And much like the FDR era ended with Jimmy Carter's loss in 1980, so it just seemed really nice and clean. 1980 to 2020 would be the Reagan era, and it would be over. However, the election did not come out as strong a repudiation of Reaganism as I would have liked. And here we are, all awaiting Jimmy Carter's Georgia to help us find out if we can leave the Reagan era definitively. So I am quite pleased to introduce a couple of historians who have agreed to help me sort out the eras of American history and the people of Georgia's parts and soul. Frank Towers is a historian at University of Calgary in Canada. He's the author of The Urban South and the Coming Civil War. And he's also edited the book Remaking North American Sovereignty with Jules Spangler's partner. He also teaches about and does public talks about recent US political history. And I believe Remaking North American Sovereignty is just out, Frank. It is. It is a 2020 book. Fordham University Press, get your copies before they run out. Much congratulations there. Matt Stanley teaches in Georgia. He's a historian at Albany State University, and he's the author of The Loyal West Civil War and the Reunion in Middle America. And he has, I believe, upcoming the Grand Army of Labor, workers, veterans, and the meaning of the Civil War. Matt, that is nearly out in time for the holidays. No, you can buy it for Easter. I think it's going to be a big Easter gift. March 15th. Comes with a ham. So I thank you guys so much for taking the time here. Just a little background. Georgia has just over 10 million people in it. Two Republican senators right now. One elected is David Perdue. And the other one was appointed Kelly Loeffler. Trump won the state by 5% in 2016 and lost it by, like, 3 tenths of a percent this time. Nearly 5 million Georgians went to the polls. Neither senator won the 50% necessary to secure their seat. Perdue beat the Democratic challenger John Osip with 49.7% of the vote. So he didn't get his 50. And Loeffler actually lost to Raphael Warnock, the Democratic challenger, 33% to 26%. But the Republican vote was split there. What's the guy's name? Doug Collins was also running. So I actually like to start with Matt, who is living in Georgia and is getting a sense of probably the inundation of this election. And if you could just kind of set the scene, and who these players are, and a little bit maybe about the Georgia electorate as well. Yeah. You've basically got a pretty stark contrast here. Between the Democrats and the Republican incumbents, as you mentioned, the senior senator right now is David Perdue, who was elected in 2014. He defeated Michelle Nunn, whose family name in Georgia runs pretty deep with former Senator, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn. It was sort of one of the last sort of Dixie crats from this region. He is, I think, was the CEO of Brebach at one point. Now the CEO of Dollar General. So he's a businessman in finance and quite a, I can't remember his net worth. It's in the tens of millions, though. So he's one of the relatively wealthy US senators. He's wealthy even by those standards. So yeah, he's the senior senator. His challenger is John Ossoff, who probably most Americans know more than they should based on that high-profile special election to Georgia's sixth district. I think it was Fall 2017, in which he lost a really narrow race that had a lot of national money and a lot of national attention behind it. He's kind of a party-centered Democrat who was born in Atlanta. He's Jewish. I think he went to Georgetown, maybe, London School of Economics. But his background, he's an investigative journalist. Lost Georgia's sixth in 2017. Yeah, high-profile race. He was endorsed by John Lewis, Stacey Abrams, Bernie Sanders. Young guy, late 30s. And Purdue barely missed the 50% majority vote in the runoff. I'm sorry, in the November 3rd vote. On the other side, you have Kelly Lefler, who's only been in the US Senate for a little less than a year. She was the appointee by our governor, Brian Kemp, to replace Johnny Isakson, who had dropped out of the Senate for health reasons. She is the wealthiest sitting senator. And she and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecker, who is the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, the founder of Intercontinental Exchange, big financial services guy. She and him, together, the combined wealth is over $500 million. She's the owner of the Atlanta Dream, WNBA team, longtime GOP donor. And she and Collins, in that November 3rd contest, you were vying for who is the most pro-Trump Republican. And so she's touted her 100% Trump voting record. Very hostile to Black Lives Matter and other racial justice initiatives and movements in Georgia has strong opinions about COVID that we can talk about later. But just introducing her, yeah, very wealthy. And also, I will say, she's not a Georgia native. She's from Illinois, where I'm from. And she's being opposed by Raphael Warnock, who is probably a left-of-center, party-centered Democrat, at least by Georgia standards, in contrast with Lefler's wealth, Warnock's origin stories that he grew up in public housing. And Savannah attended Morehouse Divinity School. Now he's been the minister of Martin Luther King's former church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. He's been the minister there for about 15 years. Kind of has a history of being involved in progressive movements and decided to run for public office. Frank, you want to underline anything about any of these four characters? I mean, I think that Matt's given us a great overview of the race. You know, there's a lot to be said here, of course. And it comes out in Matt's contrast. We've got two extremely rich Republican senators. They're COVID stock deals, I suspect, are part of the race as well. Asaf, to me, is interesting because he's so young. My understanding is he got involved in the 06 in the 2018 race because no one else would. And then surprised everybody by getting close. Has he held elective office? I don't think so. No. He's been a campaign staffer. And is he 35? Or is he younger than that? I was saying, yeah, mid 30s, 35, 36. I think he's slightly younger than I am. He looks a lot younger. Yeah, mid 30s. I suppose the other thing to say here is the unique circumstances of the Georgia runoff system, where you have to win by over 50% to win the election. And so in this case, nobody got over 50. They're going to the runoff. Traditionally, Republicans have won the runoffs. It's been a long time since the Democrat has won the runoff. There's lots of talk of, oh, maybe this time with the Stacey Abrams turnout model or with Trump calling into question the governor and the secretary of state. There might be some break there for the Democrats. But the handicappers, I think, would say the Republicans are favored in this just because their voters turn out. And it'll be a test of Democrats that they can match at this time. Right. And can we imagine? Yeah. Go ahead, Matt. Oh, I was just going to say, I also wanted to point out that the design of the runoffs that has historically favored one party over the other was that was by design, that this is a vestige, a relic of old South Dixitcrat politics. And the idea of a runoff system was that the state legislators would be able to deny or control the outcome by denying someone a win with a mere plurality of the vote. Of course, Black Georgians are a plurality. So the fear was that they would vote as a bloc. And there would be multiple white candidates who would split the vote. And so it was an explicit. It doesn't get talked about enough anymore. But this was something that was designed to dilute Black voting power and has had that effect, as Frank mentioned. So in the past, these contests of heavily favored Republicans because you see a drop-off in Democratic votes, I mean, I think in Winch Fowler in 1992, for instance, who ran way ahead of Bill Clinton on election day, but didn't reach that 50%. There was a runoff. Democratic participation fell. And he lost his elected office to the Republican. I can't remember who the Republican was. But something similar happened to Saxby Chambliss in 2008, the big blue wave in 2008, the Obama year, where the Republican did not reach the 50%. And it was really close between he and the Democrat. And then he sort of blew the Democratic challenger out a few weeks later in the runoff. So yeah, I just wanted to point out the sort of racist origins of how this system works and why it's sort of this feature of Georgia politics. That's a great point, Matt. And just to keep on this, I think when it was first crafted, there was never a thought there'd be a two-party contest. It was ultimately a way to resolve the Democratic primary in one party rule in the South. So it was always going to be the white Democrats just going to come together in the general and the fix was in. Right. OK, guys. And actually, Warnock, although it was sort of flipped now that it's no longer the Dixiecrats South, you've got the Warnock being denied his win, basically. So the effects remain. Yeah, because there was another Democratic. There were a lot of different contenders, but there were candidates. But there was another major Democratic contender, too, Joe Lieberman's son, who at one point was up, had 15%, 16% of the vote. I can't remember what he ended up with, 4%, 5%. But it wasn't just two Republicans split and won Democrat. It was Democrats largely consolidating behind Warnock and the Republicans splitting between Leffler and Collins. I mean, the messed up part of this, the irony of it is, I think I'm not sure that if you added up the Republican votes in the special for the Warnock left-over race, that they might have had more votes than the Democrats. Yeah. Warnock had the most votes, but Leffler and Collins were close enough that it. And the same thing in the Ossoff Purdue race. Purdue was ahead. So this would be great irony if the progressive candidates won only because of the runoff, because they just done first pass the post, had a normal primary where Leffler had run against Warnock. She might have pulled it out. But now we'll see. With the whole shebang at stakes here, if the Democrats can do it, they get control of the Senate. So it makes it something that's getting a lot of attention. Right. Yes. And I think we've done a nice job just who the characters are and sort of the structure of the race. Now up here in Vermont, we have very different. The dynamics are complete. We're a rural white blue state, which I know is it. So we're really trying to wrap our heads around the Georgia electorate. And the shape of it, just the demographics, I'm seeing it looks like traditionally it's been 60% white, 30% black, and then 10% Latino, Asian. But it looks like both the black and white percentage of the vote is shrinking as Latino and Asian percentages come up. And so if you kind of shape that out a little bit, I'm curious about the power of the white evangelical in this race. Go ahead, Matt. Were you going to jump in? Yeah. The 2020 was actually less racially. Can you hear me? Yes. I was going, OK. 2020 was actually less racially divided by race and less divided by class than any Georgia election in recent memory. That's not to say that it wasn't strikingly divided by those things. It was just less strikingly divided by those things. So you have changing voter demographics in some sense, as you said, the black-white polls becoming less sort of the two sides of the electorate with an influx of non-white, non-black voters. And that's lending itself to some type of shift. But I think that there are a lot of different changes that account for that, too. The state is becoming younger. It's becoming, Atlanta has grown. There have been a lot of organizing efforts among grassroots groups on the ground. So what you see is this, by no means is Georgia now can be proclaimed a blue state. But you're seeing a purpling of the state that some pollsters have been predicting for several decades. I think Trump won by, what we say, five or six in 2016. Camp won by, I think, Stacey Abrams in what was a very suspect election by about 40 or 50,000 votes in 2018. And the state had the largest increase of turnout in that midterm of any state in 2018. And Biden wins this year by, what, 13,000 or 14,000 votes. I can't remember what he's last step by. But the turnout, for a deep Southern state, compared to its neighboring states, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, the turnout has been pretty massive in Georgia over the last few cycles. And it hit about 68% this time, which means that Georgia was above the national average in voter turnout. So some of the big shifts, even from 2016 to 2020, and the reasons the state flipped, blew this time, at least in terms of the person at the top of the ticket, as Biden really saw an increase in older voters. Black voters and non-white, non-black voters went for Biden at about the same rate that they went for Clinton in 2016. Really not that much different. The big gains for Biden were actually wealthier, whiter suburbanites. Basically, Trump lost ground among white and affluent voters by about 10 points. People make another $100,000 to identify as white. I think Clinton won about 20% of white voters in Georgia in 2016. Biden won about a third this time. So that's a pretty significant gap. And in sort of this weird dynamics of the race, and you're seeing this in other states, too, places like Virginia, this really comes out, that Biden won the working class if you want to define earning. I mean, there's a lot of different ways we can define class. But if you're looking at earners, Biden won, I guess, low-income voters. And he won the highest bracket of income voters. So those making under $40,000 or $50,000 a year, and those with households making over $100,000 a year, Biden won. And Trump won the sort of middle of $50,000, $60,000 to $100,000, $120,000 household earners. So that combined with Trump losing just a little bit of ground among white evangelicals was enough to put Biden over the top in a strong turnout year. I want to just build on a couple things Matt's saying. There's a lot of stuff in there I want to talk about. But at some point, we should think about why Georgia was different than the two states that borders Florida and South Carolina. I think for Democrats, there was some wild dream that Jamie Harrison was going to beat Lindsey Graham, didn't come close. And that Florida was the more likely of those states. And Georgia actually was the place where, I mean, Georgia was the least likely looking at it in the polls ahead. North Carolina looked better. But Georgia did it. I think some of the now congealing conventional wisdom less than a month afterwards of Stacey Abrams was a big part of that. And I'd be curious to get Matt's take on it. But I want to talk about one zeroing in on this and plug a book. This is Matthew Lasseter's The Silent Majority. Sunbelt politics, or suburban politics in Sunbelt South. It's now about 14 years old. It's amazing. The historian Kevin Cruz, who's more of a media figure, also wrote a very good book about Atlanta around the same time. But Lasseter really focused on the Republican, the Southern strategy of Nixon, where the Republicans moved the South from being Democratic to majority Republican by picking up the white vote, often gets viewed as Nixon picking up the Wallace voters, the real redneck reactionary people dug in on segregation. Redneck's not a good term. But the royal white vote. And a lot of what Nixon won in the 70s was a suburban vote. And that certainly held through the Reagan era. And the county that's the most interesting to me is Cobb County in the greater Atlanta Metro. That's an interesting place. Lasseter has a lot to say about it. It was a county that had not many people in it. Marietta was a small town, but it took off because of Lockheed and Cold War defense contracting becomes a booming fast-growing place in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And then some transplants move in from other states famously Newt Gingrich. And who is the bar? What was his first name? You guys remember him? He was a Clinton impeacher. I don't want to say, I think it was William Barr, but they're two of the really leading lights of the Gingrich majority, including Gingrich himself, were from out of state. Barr was from Iowa, Houston, Pennsylvania. They're part of that transplant wave. They pick up on evangelical voters. They talked a lot about sort of suburban values, but they're also, you know, diehard partisans. And Cobb County in some ways was the epicenter for the new Southern Republicanism, a lot like suburban Houston, where Tom DeLay came from, Biden won Cobb County. That is, you know, a big transformation in the way that the Southern electorate looks. And you can see it happening across the South. You know, where that goes is a question, but it does create this weird coalition that Matt mentioned of real rich white people, very poor non-white people in something that looks sort of like the, you're ready to share it, John Judith's idea of the new democratic majority from around 2000, widely discredited, but still compelling that there's some sort of, you know, fusion there, but I think it's a real, the long-term stakes of that are something we talk about more. I'll stop there. Thank you, Frank. So I think a lot of people in the North have trouble understanding how Donald Trump, this kind of, you know, textbook New York con man could have any appeal in the South. And I'm just wondering his attacks on some of the institutions that are well known in Georgia, like the CDC, which is, you know, in Atlanta and has been sequestered from the politics of Washington. And then also, I don't know if Georgians have a lot of pride in like CNN and have this, you know, news network not in New York, that it's Atlanta-based, these institutions that Trump has really just gone after. And I don't know if there's some Georgia pride there on these institutions. And also, of course, Jimmy Carter, that pride. Any thoughts there, Matt? I mean, call that the triple C's. Carter, the CDC and CNN. Yeah, that's a great question, Mike. And it's a really complicated one. I would say, yeah, Trump's appeal, I mean, yeah. I mean, first of all, I would remind everyone that in 2016, you had a very divided Republican primary and Trump, you know, had a plurality of support that has since coalesced into this reality where Trump has a very high approval rating in his own party. So a lot of vehemently anti-Trump people, and a lot of them write major national political figures like Lindsey Graham and others who vehemently anti-Trump to then all of a sudden make this transition to almost strangely adoptive of this cult of personality around Trump. But I think that Trump's appeal, just to simplify it, overly simplified, it depends on your context. I mean, you know, to evangelicals, he represents certain evangelical values that they, you know, particularly things regarding abortion and different cultural. Hold on, man. What are the marital fidelity? Abortion. Trump's had a few. No, I'm not saying that this is the objective reality. I'm saying this is the reality of voter rationalization. Yeah, and actually if we want to stay in Georgia and speak about the pro-life movement, it was an immigration detention facility in Georgia where we got real life forced sterilization. I mean, I would think any pro-lifer would be up in arms. You know, I think a lot of Republicans ended up coming around him. I have friends and acquaintances who, you know, claimed they didn't vote for him or wouldn't vote for him in 2016, who ended up supporting him vocally and proudly in 2020 because to them, he governed, despite the bluster, he governed like, like basically like, he was not all different from, you know, Bush or Romney or any other number of Republicans. If you can get past a didn't like Trump's aesthetic, but if you look at what he pursued, which is tax cuts, conservative appointments to the court, those were the most important issues for them and they supported him. And of course, there are another, whole nother block of Republican voters who are gravitate toward Trump's bluster and to his sort of fake populism and his attacks on the CDC and CNN and other sort of well-known elite institutions are part of this sort of fake populist veneer. It is fake because as you said, he is a New York billionaire, millionaire, however much money he has, whatever, an incredibly wealthy sort of plutocrat. So the idea of sort of people backing him who would find themselves in other scenarios sort of averse to that type of figure is ironic. But you know, Trump has successfully curated this anti-authoritarian in some sense, anti-establishment, hyper-masculine and sort of pro-gun, pro-second amendment image that that sticks with some people even though what he's doing is sort of, you know, fleecing the public good and the public coffers. I wanna follow up on Mike's question. Does anybody there love Jimmy Carter? Or what are Republicans think about it? A legacy, yeah, yeah. Democrats love Jimmy Carter, liberals love Jimmy Carter. By and large, black Georgians love Jimmy Carter. He is a source of shame and embarrassment for the sort of conservative elite. And I mean, he's beloved even by some conservatives in Southwest Georgia just because he's from this area or he's a local guy. But by and large, Jimmy Carter's very polarizing in this state. And it just really depends on your political, your partisan affiliation, your political ideology, how you feel about Carter. You know, I surprised myself looking up, in 1980, Carter won Georgia like 55 to 40. Reagan only got 40% in Georgia in 1980s. I had in my mind that Georgia had walked away from him before he was even done his first term, but I was really glad to see he held his home state, which, you know, like Al Gore can't say that, you know? I mean, that's right. I mean, on the Southern moderate democratic, you know, great white hopes, Clinton, Gore, Carter. Yeah, I think Sam Nunn wanted to be that. There were a lot of people who had ambitions, but those three really stand out. All three of their states completely repudiated them, you know, after Carter, Democrats held Senate seats into the 21st century in Arkansas, but now it's, you know, it's red as red can be. And it's, you know, it's, I don't quite know what to say about it, but there, yeah, the idea of regional loyalty, partisan seems to be trumping all that stuff. I hate to use that word now, bastard. But it does, you know, it overrides it. So, yeah, they don't, I don't know. That's sort of my take from a distance on what's going on there. Matt seems to agree, if you're a Democrat, it doesn't matter. Made us famous in the wrong way. That's basically right. Matt, what are you seeing with the ads on the TV and just how the each of candidates are approaching this election? Every time I see, Kelly Loeffler seems to be making this about like marijuana and Tiger King. I'm really, I'm trying to understand the different approaches and you're probably getting inundated by a lot of advertising. Yeah, I consider myself quite the expert on this because I watch a lot of Hulu and I watch a lot of. You lose him. Yeah, for a moment. I'm streaming TV so I can't enjoy these ads. But yeah, the Loeffler ads against Warnock are particularly vicious. And the general idea I think is to smear him as a communist and as a black radical. There are ads featuring Fidel Castro, Reverend Jeremiah Wright who we remember from 2008, charging Warnock with sort of anti-Americanism from cherry picking and taking out of context certain phrases and verses from sermons, sometimes not at all. They just show sort of images of communists. And ironically is a lot of the same sort of attacks that were leveled against Martin Luther King, who was a Reverend at the same church that Warnock is now heading. But it's this idea of this old, it's not an institutionalized form of red baiting like you saw in the 1950s or even into the 1960s. But it is sort of this weapon to paint reform as radicalism and all radicalism as treasonous or disloyalty in some way. So the idea of civil rights are communist. Communism is on American. So therefore civil rights are actually on American. And it's not, go ahead Frank. Oh, I was just gonna inject. Does Warnock at least get credit for bringing religious extremists and famous atheists together? Like he's got Castro and Wright, that's, you think those guys, that's a coalition right there. That's what theology right there. You're thinking too abstractly for whoever's putting these videos together. But Warnock, I think these videos do demonstrate that Republicans do see Warnock as the bigger threat. And as I said, he's too, generally speaking, he's probably two Ossoffs left. And I think more than Ossoff, he has the capacity to sort of sustain democratic voter excitement and turn out non-white voters in large numbers in January. And I think Republicans obviously identify that because those Warnock ads are pretty hostile. And I mean, I don't know how much truth there is too. I haven't read his book. Warnock has a book. The two faces of the black church or something like that, I can't remember. But apparently there are some sort of less than, less than hostile words towards socialist politics and even Marxism in that book that Leffler is playing fast and loose with. But this is old-time red-baiting stuff by and large. And it's not just limited to the Leffler campaigns. Actually, Purdue, I don't know if you saw this in the news, that his campaign had posted an image of Ossoff with an elongated nose. They had used the sort of stereotypically Jewish physiognomy to make Ossoff seem like a sort of Jewish caricature. They've also, Purdue has just called Ossoff blatantly a socialist. I'm a member of DSA Atlanta Metro and I promise you, John Ossoff is not. But the other ads, they're pairing him with unpopular national Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer and other things. But it's pretty nasty racist vile stuff. On the Democratic side, the negative ads have mostly focused on the insider trading issue. So Purdue dumping casino stock the same day as the private Senate COVID meeting and picking up Pfizer stock. Leffler doing the same thing. I think she dumped $19 million worth of stock the same day that the Senate was, got a briefing on COVID back in January of 20. So it's focused a lot on corruption. It's focused a lot on healthcare and pandemic relief. Not on the same level. The one thing I did wanna mention is I've been surprised by how these ads have not focused on the massive disparity that Frank mentioned between two candidates who are, John Ossoff is a millionaire, a very low caliber millionaire. Raphael Warnock almost certainly is not. And then they're opposed by two candidates whose net worth combined is well in excess of half a billion dollars. That it's curious to me that the sort of dearth of class politics in the Democratic attack ads sort of no reference to these material divides, no indication that this is really a contest between plutocrats on one side and sort of regular elites on the other. But that somehow the populism works from the right in that dynamic is hard to wrap your head around. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, you know, we can go look at 2020. And I'm not a member of DSA, but I hate the Republicans. So, you know, full disclosure. And coming out of the election, of course, leave it to Democrats to feel like we lost even though we actually won the thing. But in the recriminations about why we didn't win bigger, I mean, Democratic populism is one thing I've heard. I had a family member who ran for office in rural Iowa and she lost and looking at the Iowa autopsy where Democrats thought they were gonna be much better. They just got wiped out. You know, they ran on healthcare. They ran on the party of responsibility. They were gonna help farmers. You know, everything was very earnest and decent. They didn't go door to door. And, you know, Republicans accused them of being, you know, it's Satan's orgy every Thursday, which meets in Brussels, by the way. And the counter was, you know, Democrats have to try some populism back at these folks. It's a big, I mean, there are lots of reasons why that may not be as workable for Democrats, but I do wonder like, you know, if you go back to the New Deal, the Democrats were populist. They would attack these people as plutocrats and they would be mean to them. They would hit them hard for a whole bunch of stereotypes about rich people screwing the poor. And that, you know, that line of attack, that's missing. I don't know if bringing it back would be the answer, but why not? Well, Frank, thanks for reminding us that the reason that this runoff election is so crucial is that Gideon didn't win in Maine. Greenfield didn't win in Iowa. Bullock didn't win in Montana. And whatever strategy, whatever message they were floating, it didn't work. And I don't know, Matt, if you're saying it's looking a lot like Warnock and Ossoff are kind of using this tepid playbook that's concerning. Maybe Ossoff, more than Warnock. I don't know, I'd have to really sit it down and sort of analyze their messaging. I don't think that Warnock would be one of the sort of runaway from populist politics. But in some ways he's going for a different, not a different, but he's coming from a slightly different political background than Ossoff who is from the Atlanta suburbs, is highly focused, his strategy, even in 2017 was highly focused on winning certain income levels of white voters in suburban Atlanta. And I don't want to make a broad claim about what Democrats should or shouldn't do everywhere. Clearly, I think though, an injection of populism is workable in many cases, in many scenarios, and it's much needed in many scenarios. And as I spoke to earlier, what you see in Georgia I don't know, and Frank sort of pondered the long-term implications of this, but what does a coalition look like? Is it sustainable? First of all, when you have a political coalition between the wealthiest people in the state and the most working-class people in the state, what are the limits of that kind of coalition? What does the source of democratic gains in places like Georgia and Virginia and elsewhere that are relying on wider wealthier suburbanites, what do they mean for the party? What do they say about the limits of populism that the party can achieve? By definition, these are voters who have more conservative views on economics, even though they're probably very liberal on things like gay marriage and maybe even racial justice issues, other sort of cultural issues, pro-choice, but almost by definition are probably behind, even in some places, the Republican electorate on certain economic issues. We saw, right, in some of these ballot initiatives that Republican voters are not mechanically reactionary on economic planks. I mean, in some cases, particularly like marijuana, the minimum wage, there are large swaths of Republican voters who are to the left of even Biden. So what does that mean and how do you tap into that impulse? So here's the thing about this. When political scientists look at what people are for, I mean, again, partisanship seems to be subsuming everything. So middle-class liberals or suburban Democrats are more progressive on a lot of economic issues than working-class Trump voters, but generally when they get framed as partisan issues. So yeah, we wanna raise the minimum wage. Yeah, we wanna tax the rich. And if the Republicans flip the script, they might be in a different place. I mean, I totally agree with you, Matt, that how does a party of suburbia and the poorest part of the country work? Now, of course, that alliance would be great. If those two groups could really work together, that would be wonderful, but there's some clear divides in what they're for. I think one thing that Democrats worried about coming out of the election was, is Trump gonna start picking up non-white working-class voters? He'd already gotten ice cube, and that guy's from the hood at least was at one point and 50 cent was curious. And I don't know, he got some Hispanic votes that maybe there's this thing and Marco Rubio was like, we've gotta become the party of the working-class. Like, good luck, buddy. Go put the minimum wage up there right now in the lame duck and get it and show us your cred. They're never gonna do that. The other side is equally problematic. I mean, how do the Republicans really sustain being the party of the working man? And unless it's entirely through excuse my English bullshit about conspiracies and all this other stuff or, you know, trying to distort the records and say that the stuff they did in the election, which was a kind of misinformation campaign, neither party is delivering for the 50% of America, for the poorest 50% of America. Democrats do a little better, but trying to get those issues as the things that really drive elections, I think would be is sort of a third question here. You know, as you're saying that, they're not really front and center. Healthcare is the proxy for democratic labor legislation. It's a pretty weak one. I mean, I'm in Canada. The idea that Obamacare is socialism, I have like conservative students like, yeah, I hear there's socialism in America. What's your deal? You go to the doctor for free, you moron. What is your opinion? Oh, to your point, Frank, and this is a fascinating exit poll takeaway from Georgia is that almost 70% of Georgia voters support, and this is the quotes, this is the phrase that was used, government-run healthcare, not attached to any political party. If you called it Trumpcare, Republican, a majority of Republicans would support it. If you called it Obamacare, a majority of liberals would support it. And then of course you have Obamacare kind of, this healthcare has been a major issue in these ads and in this campaign, but we don't really know what it means. There's a majority of Georgians want Obamacare gone. Some of those Georgians want Obamacare gone because it has failed to live up to what they thought it could do in the middle of a pandemic. Others just see Obama, the word, and want it repealed. Warnock and Ossoff both support a public option. We don't really know what a public option actually means. Of course this is what Biden supports as well, but he's talked about it in various terms. Is it limited to lower income Americans? Is it means tested? Is it, what does he really mean by public option? And the other thing that you mentioned, Frank, that I want to touch on real quick or expand on real quick is the fact that the fact that when we talk about working class voters, we should remember that 40% of Americans who are eligible to vote don't vote in any given election. And sometimes it's higher than that. I mean, that's in a presidential election. And those voters, those non-voters skew, of course, lower income, more racially diverse and young. So we're talking about a party that in the Republican Party talking about these left-leur ads are a perfect example of this, talking about identifying with the working class. So someone worth half a billion dollars, identifying with the working class, of painting her opponent as anti-working class, someone who literally grew up in the housing projects of Savannah. And at the same time, you're tending to be a working class party, but they are speaking directly to the ownership managerial class of white voters. So the Democratic, the Republican base is a petty bourgeois base, to put it in sort of Marxist terms. They see themselves as working people. That is an identity that many of them have adopted, but these are people who drive 40,000, $60,000 vehicles, live in, you know, $300,000 homes. These are the biggest Trump supporters and Trump donors. The working class is not really represented by anybody. Democrats are slightly better at it. And Republicans try to appeal to some white workers through, as you say, bullshit and sort of white nationalism, white identity politics, Christian identity politics, things like that. I mean, this was, I remember Thomas Frank split some out of Kansas. You know, one of his observations there was, suburban Kansas city was full of people who called themselves members of the working class. He was like, what are you talking about? But that's, yeah, but I work. Sure. Oh, fine. Yeah. And that's, you know, that's pride and labor versus those people that are getting the government check. And we would be, we're losing some time here and we'd be really remiss if we didn't talk about the COVID overlay. You've spoken about public health. We've got an electorate that's just been hammered for decades on, you know, government isn't the solution, government is the problem. And we've got a public health emergency where clearly government is going to have to get us to some sense of functional society again. So, Matt, I'm curious how COVID is playing in Georgia. I mean, what your state restrictions are, it's probably not a mandatory mass state. You were talking about, you know, the hypermasculinity. So any shape you can give to that would be really helpful. Yeah, COVID has been, and especially in the election cycle but really in many ways has been this sort of prism through which so many other political issues have filtered out and become illuminated. And really in many ways this runoff is a mandate on COVID because you have two, you know, people like Warnock and Ossoff who are doing drive by rallies. They're, you know, they're selling masks on their campaign sites, fully in line with the sort of scientific consensus and the CDC guidelines and everything else. Then on the flip side of that, you have Lefler and Perdue who have both basically repeated, in some cases verbatim Trump's rhetoric about first it being a hoax, then it being sort of these anti-Chinese, xenophobic connections that, you know, China will pay for this or that, you know, they sort of connected to these traditional, you know, anti-Chinese racism having to do with food or uncleanliness or whatever else it is. You know, downplaying the scientific risks, laughing in the face of basic science. Perdue to I guess his most basic credit has encouraged hand washing and face mask wearing. Lefler's position is almost explicitly anti-mask. She's had COVID at least once from appearance, appearing at, you know, public rallies with no mask on. Perdue though has repeated, you know, these COVID fabrications talking repeatedly about how it was, you know, no worse than the seasonal flu about how the flu kills more people. And they've of course, both had posed additional pandemic relief, opposed any kind of lockdown, any kind of restrictions. And to that end, if you look at the people who voted for Perdue and Lefler in the exit polls, their number one, their number one sort of priority as far as issues were concerned was the economy. However, you want to frame that. Basically, they'll, you know, they stay open. Whereas on the flip side, the voters for Ossoff and Warnock, almost tied for the single biggest thing were racial inequality and COVID response relief. And this is, you know, this has shown up, of course, in the ethics complaints too, against both Lefler and Perdue that I mentioned about them, you know, stock dumping and stock buying on the day that they received Senate briefings. So here's, you know, I was trying to think of, has there been something like this in, let's say the 1945 to 1970 period, where Americans were this divided about a clear public crisis? I mean, civil rights, Vietnam, really divisive issues, but they weren't quite the same as the pandemic. Coming into it, you would think like, this is not going to be one that turns into the red-blue thing. But of course it did. And that's, you know, that's really bad, I mean, for public health that the thing got politicized. But it does signal something about, you know, where the times are in the States. And I say this from up here, where that's happening, you know, there is an anti-mass crowd in Western Canada, particularly strong, but our premier Justin Trudeau is very popular, probably on his way to reelection. And he's, you know, he's been good enough. Lots of countries have been able to do this without the really sharp partisan divide over it. And that's, you know, it's a symptom of what the polarization stuff has done. Because of course, you know, the countries that have had their economies really do well are Germany, folks who handled it. South Korea, the places with the lowest COVID have had their economies come back. And so it's just turned into this kind of crazy rhetorical thing. You could see economic incentives for, hey, make everybody go back to work. I don't have to pay any extra taxes. I wanna make, you know, if I'm just one of these machinators at the top, if we have a big public response, it'll just empower government. I can sort of understand that argument, but for folks on the, you know, who aren't in those positions, there's a real logic to saying, no, don't put me to work, do what these other places have done, pay me to stay home and keep everybody safe. And that just never, it never got off the ground in the States. And we're in a place right now in this country where the good people of Georgia hold the possibility of functional government in their hands. If both of these democratic challengers go to Washington, the odds of stimulus checks to individuals and also to help with state budgets are much more likely. So it's just, it's incredible the amount of power that Georgia voter has right now. It's just, I, I, I'm... Do you think, do you think voters are voting on that? Like this is for the control of the Senate. It's basically like a redo of the presidential. It's making, for me, it's making Biden the actual, you know, the actual president. He's gonna have an impossible time with McConnell and a Republican Senate with all the chairs being Republicans. It's, I think the only way forward is if he has a functioning legislative branch. Do the, I guess it's Vermont, our man on the ground. Do you think there's that 0.3% still out there that will get their shit together and say, yeah, we got to do this because it's just, it's like the election we just had. I have no idea, Frank. And I don't know if the better strategy is to try to flip that 0.3% or to go find the other percent, the other 35% who didn't vote. No. And I don't know who will be discouraged by the Republican sort of civil war going on between Leffler and Perdue and Raffensperger. I don't know who will be galvanized by that. I don't know what impact the personalities in the race will have. I have no idea. I wish I knew. What about, I mean, this is, I realize Mike's asking questions, but tell us more about Stacey Abrams because she's now held up as, you know, the savior. She did, she is the symbol of get out the vote that Democrats blew in Florida, messed up on state after state, but they did it right in Georgia. Is she really doing something different there? Can you sort of see it? Well, I wish, you know, one of my regrets, one of the things that I missed most about the pandemic and having an infant in the house is that I haven't really been able, I haven't really been on the ground. I haven't been able to do much anything politically this year. I did some, you know, phone banking for Sanders during the primary. I, you know, made a donation here and there, but I haven't been knocking on doors. I haven't been doing anything in terms of grassroots organizing or voter drives that I've done in the past. But, you know, Stacey Abrams with, you know, Fair Fight and then before that, the New Georgia project, there were, I don't know, there were at least half a dozen major get out the vote initiatives here in my town in Albany that I saw making at least, you know, I know that turnout was high, but those voters, that voter registration ended up being really imperative because Republican turnout was high as well. So it was sort of a race to drive up turnout. And I will make, yeah, I think to speak to a point we made earlier that the democratic gains owe a lot less to sort of demographics and destiny than to grassroots organizing and voter drives that, I mean, some of my friends and students have worked tirelessly under awful conditions, you know, during the pandemic. And I've had a particularly brutal semester teaching as well. So my on the ground experience has been very, very limited in that regard. But yeah, there have been, you know, the role of Abrams and she's gotten a lot of credit, but there are a lot of people doing a lot of work. She's just become the sort of the figure head for an army of grassroots. And that's a measure of... It's voter registration in Georgia, but I've never, I'm living in either here or Ohio. Yeah. That's a real measure of motivation and enthusiasm, which traditionally dies off during a runoff. So the hope is that the voters of Georgia realize how much they're holding in their hands right now and they get out there and, you know, give us a Senate that we can actually imagine functioning. So, guys, we're way past time, but we've had a blast. And I want to thank you so much, Frank Towers and Matt Stanley. Two, as you can tell, very knowledgeable historians who can... Well, make things a little relatable because it's quite disturbing what we've lived through. And it's really this whole decade has been just a disaster. So I'm looking forward to turning the calendar to 2021. The 20s will officially start, right, when you start saying one. And we'll have a nice progressive decade. Guaranteed. We will. Sounds good, Mike. Mike, thanks. This was tons of fun and great to see you and good to see you again, Matt. Likewise. Thanks, Mike. All right, signing off. Georgia. Georgia. Your home. Georgia. Georgia.