Georgia Black DINO state rep, endorses Trump

[Badger]

Can we still primary him?

He has a primary challenger.

Yep. Dead Man Walking.

[Badger]

First things first. This guy is a crackhead, and does not belong in the Democratic Party. If he was some Dixiecrat from Turner County, I'd understand, but if he's from freaking DeKalb there's no business here. Also, note the rule of white conservative politics. The more blacks in your coalition, the more conservative whites you scare off. Ask LBJ how the Dems lost the South.

It's not 1964

While true, Lee Atwater did say something along the lines of we can't use the N-word anymore so we're gonna use forced bussing, tough on crime etc.

Attitudes have drastically changed.

Yes. Modern day Republicans have switched back to being far less subtle.

[Badger]

Why does the Atlanta region have so many DINOs?
https://www.ajc.com/blog/politics/georgia-democratic-lawmaker-endorses-trump-presidential-bid/dpqTbn2pBPIivHNgPdNSdN/

On one hand, these are fairly common situations when you have 90% of a large constituency clustered within one party. When 90% of a community is in one party, you're bound to have loads of people with terrible beliefs on one issue or another. It's a good reason why so many GOP state caucuses where they achieved supermajority status can't seem to agree on much of anything.

On the other hand, this is Vernon Jones, who has been known as a long-time pariah in Georgia Democratic politics (as an example, he's the only Democrat who comes to mind who managed not only to lose a statewide primary runoff despite coming in 1st in the first round, but actually got a smaller vote share in the runoff). His name recognition in Dekalb (and now Rockdale) is the only reason he's managed to get back in office time after time, and it'll be the only thing that can (and probably will) save him this time. His opponent has a lot of party and community organizing history in Rockdale, though (which is >60% of the district), so we'll see. The state party will put everything they can into helping her, I imagine.

Do you really think he has a shot to win again? He has full-throatedly endorsed one of the hated politicians among AA's, and furthermore it has gotten fairly extensive coverage. I imagine that Taylor will basically be to flip any voter she can manage to contact.

Probably the biggest dynamic working against him is it'll be a primary by mail this year, where voters have to procure 3 stamps and endure 2 rounds of bureaucracy to vote. I'm not looking to write a 5-paragraph essay of nuance on the primary voting habits of majority-black constituencies, why they are more prone to re-electing/less prone to primarying awful incumbents and how the Trump era has not outraged black communities as much as white ones, but the gist is: there will likely be a large contingent of people voting in the primary who won't even know about this, and will simply defer to incumbency & name recognition (before anybody wants to complain about this, ask yourself how he got into the State House in '16 in the first place?).

There'll undoubtedly be a lot of squawking among state politicos, Atlas types and other avid political followers over this; if the district were 75% white and filled with WOWs and #Resist types, then his ass would be grass. Given his district and name rec, that outcome is by no means guaranteed. He's not the first s[inks]tbird to survive a primary because he did something bad.

He might not be an absolute favorite, but he isn't automatically guaranteed to be some underdog because of this either.

Since his opponent only lost by 8 points last time, and this is undoubtedly a game-changer, it's hard to see how he'd pull it out in a regular non-mail election. Fingers crossed!