Scrimshaw Spotlight: Forsyth's Future
Why Socially Liberal Whites Are Moving Left
What county had the biggest 2018-2021 swing in Georgia to Democrats, using the Ossoff race as the barometer? It's a funky question, and I'm only like 99% sure I'm right about this, but it was Forsyth County, an exurban county north of Atlanta, where Jon Ossoff outran Stacey Abrams by 6.6%. Why is this notable? Forsyth was whites only as a county until the 90s. And now, it is swinging hard to the left.
Mitt Romney got 80% in Forsyth in 2012, winning the county by 63%. Now, it's still Republican, don't get me wrong, but that 63% winning margin is down to 33% in the Biden-Trump race, and even down ballot, Perdue only won it by 36% in January. It is swinging left hugely, just as Southlake, Texas has, where this series began. And the reasons for both their ruby red nature and their swings are similar but Forsyth explains very well why the GOP lost Georgia, and why, frankly, they don't really have a shot to get it back any time soon.
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"It allowed me to think about this issue from a new perspective."
That was the quote Rob Portman gave in 2013 when he announced he was changing his view on gay marriage. The "it" at the beginning of that quote, of course, was the fact that Portman's middle child is gay, and two years previously, had come out to his parents. Portman was no moderate on issues around gay rights - he voted for the Defense Of Marriage Act and he voted to ban same sex couples from adopting while a House member in the 90s - but that personal experience changed his views, and he became the first Republican Senator to come out for marriage equality.
I've always had a soft spot for Portman ever since - his public announcement came at the point at which my battle over who I was and whether I could continue to be in the closet was raging hardest. Indeed, I would make it another six weeks from his announcement to coming out myself. But that quote isn't a particularly revelatory quote or anything - Dick Cheney has given a version of it before in his discussing his daughter - but it is an important one, because it explains why the GOP aren't getting back to 70% of the vote in Forsyth again, let alone Romney's 80%. It's just not going to happen.
The voters of Forsyth are the classic Romney-Biden voters - social liberals who make a lot of money. In many cases, their parents ran to Forsyth to get away from Black people, and that legacy pervades. But it is starting to change. Forsyth is down to about 80% white - an insane number for 30 minutes from Atlanta, but progress nonetheless. And, that progress matters, because it's causing a much larger swing to Democrats than you'd realize just from the small amounts of greater diversity.
Yes, some of the change in how Forsyth votes is the fact that something like 18% of the county is now non-white, but that doesn't cause a 30% swing in two Presidential cycles. What does is the way that diversity causes white people to change their minds. And the story of Southlake and Forsyth is of educated whites changing their minds. Understanding why that is is the key to understanding politics, and the answer is pretty simple - knowing someone who isn't like you makes you much more likely to properly contextualize their pain, their anger, and prioritize their values. And all that changes your vote.
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Just as the act of having a gay son changed Rob Portman's views on gay marriage, there is a myriad set of examples of white people changing social attitudes towards African Americans based on proximity to Black people and Black culture. Pew data from 2019 found that white Democrats were substantially more likely to agree with the notion that Black people face discrimination across a range of issues - policing, hiring and promotions, medical care, issues of obtaining finance - than white Republicans. 88% of white Democrats accept that Black Americans face unequal treatment by US whites, a number which falls to 43% amongst white Republicans. That gap exists because one political party accepts reality, and the other denies it every day on a major cable news network.
Whites who believe that whiteness is a leg up, that Black people making up disproportionate amounts of those incarcerated, and that outcomes are unjust are swinging to Democrats. And those changes in social attitudes come most frequently when you know someone affected by the bigotry and unjust outcomes. Rob Portman didn't care about inequality for people like me when he voted for DOMA, or when he voted to ban gay couples from adopting in DC. He didn't care about the issues, or the people he never met. He cared because it was his kid, and whatever other convictions went out the window because he did not want his son to have to face unequal outcomes in life. I wish that wasn't what it took, but it so often is.
Forsyth is slowly getting more diverse, and that is causing a cascading effect of swing, pushing white social liberals who had been similarly walled off from the consequences of their votes to have to live with the consequences of their support for a party of bigotry. It isn't impossible, but it is a lot harder to vote against the tenants of your social liberalism - racial equality, gay marriage, and rights to abortion - when the GOP are the party of Donald Trump than when it was Mitt Romney's merry band of morally decent conservatism. Romney's Republican Party is dead, in large part because those voters who used to vote for tax cuts and against social attitudes cannot fathom doing so anymore. It is a lot harder to vote for the GOP's tax cuts when your neighbours are Black, your favourite local restaurant is owned by a lovely Mexican couple, and you play golf every other week with the gay couple two streets down.
That transition takes time, obviously, and the specific examples can and will be different for everyone, but that lived experience of diversity - of people from diverse backgrounds, diverse life experiences, and diverse cultures - is a far cry from the notion of diversity. You can think you know what it's like to know a gay person, and to be totally accepting of them, but it's nothing like the lived experience of actually talking to someone about the actual life they've lived. Things that seem so normal, or so unconnected, actually stem back to whatever that element of diversity is, because of an event or many events that shaped you. None of this is knowable in a theoretical sense, but all it is intensely logical once it's said.
Forsyth is only going to get more blue as time goes on, as it gets more diverse and the white voters there continue to learn and meet new people. It is why Democrats will eventually win Southlake, and why Western Australian Labor just raced home in the rich suburbs last weekend. It's why Liberals win Milton by 15% now in Canada, and why Tooting has seen its Labour margin in the UK go from 5% to 25% in 4 years. It's why Orange County is trending blue, and why Joe Biden's best Congressional District as compared to Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin was the 5th - anchored, as it is, in the WOW collar around Milwaukee.
You want to know why I'm so doubtful of that stupidly named notion of "suburban reversion", well this is why. This is the hill the GOP need to climb, the voters they need to win back. And they need to do it all while showing absolutely no interest in doing so, while their media allies are doing anti-vax propaganda in prime time, and while Joe Biden refuses to give any culture war nonsense to the masses. It's bluntly not going to work, because social liberals understand you cannot continue to stand with your friends and vote against them, their interests, and their safety. Unless the GOP radically changes who they are - to the point where their gains in rural and regional America all get reversed - they're not coming back in Forsyth. It's just not going to happen.