The American political story this fall will get told in Georgia.
Here's what the pot holds for stirring in that state:
• An exploding population that changes demographically in a rapid way, lessening the percentage of white people while increasing that of people of many shades, producing a state that evolves from deep red to an emerging purple.
• Party primaries that, even when put together, represent less than half the state's general electorate, rewarding the Republican right and Democratic left. People tending to vote in partisan primaries have become more passionate, more strident, more demonizing of the other side and more the deciders of their marginalized intra-party contests. Passively moderate independents are being force-fed choices they don't like.
• A governor's race that vividly showcases all of that with a brutally right-wing Trumpian, Brian Kemp, as the Republican nominee and an Ivy League-educated lawyer and liberal and black woman, Stacey Abrams, as the Democratic candidate.
In the Republican governor's primary, 585,000 votes were cast. In the Democratic, 555,000 were cast. Together, that's 1.14 million, less than half the general election turnout in the governor's race of 2014.
The two winners, together, got about 850,000 votes, each in the landslide vicinity of 70 percent. That is to say that 850,000 Georgians have dictated the gubernatorial choices for nearly 2 million others.
Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle was in the Republican race until Donald Trump tweeted an endorsement of Kemp, who was doing television commercials cocking his gun and climbing into his pickup to say he might round up illegals and haul 'em back across the border.
Talking-tall Tommy Robinson was ahead of his time, wasn't he?
On the Democratic side, Abrams, the Yale-educated African American woman, won handily talking of a new and fully inclusive Georgia in which Confederate monuments would come down.
Establishment Georgians of both parties have long enjoyed--since Jimmy Carter's day--centrist state politics that obliged population and business growth, particularly outward from Atlanta. But now, suddenly, they find no comfortable place to go.
It's as if Arkansas offered a governor's general-election race featuring no pragmatic conservative like Asa Hutchinson, but, say, extremist Gun Goddess Jan Morgan, and, on the Democratic side, no accomplished center-left young prospect like Jared Henderson, but, say ... Joyce Elliott.
The establishment types would be sitting around in the chambers of commerce offices wondering ... what the heck? Is the smarter and more experienced liberal black woman maybe our best bet?
Arkansas is far from that point, owing to its static population. Arkansas is not the future or the story. Georgia is.
We in Arkansas can get a little glimpse of part of the Georgia story this week. As I noted Sunday, the Arkansas Democratic Party is staging a three-day event Thursday through Saturday that will feature, on Thursday night, a speech from Abrams at a reception at South on Main in downtown Little Rock.
She's something of the rage nationally, lately on the cover of magazines and the front page of the Sunday New York Times. It's because of her compelling personal story as combined with the nationally microcosmic narrative described herein.
The sense is that she is seriously competitive in this race against the Trump-in-a-pickup she opposes. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but we could be looking at the nation's first black female governor.
Her biggest problem may be her openly confessed debts of $150,000 or more in taxes, credit cards and student loans, which didn't stop her from seeding her campaign with a $50,000 loan from her own money. She has written and talked about that, contending that trying to keep her head above water financially gives her something in common with everyday people and that it shouldn't be that only rich people can afford to seek office.
Republicans are warming up against her by saying she can't handle even her own money and would turn Georgia into California.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Georgia by 51 percent to 46 percent, by 211,000 votes in 4.1 million cast. It was close enough that Georgia couldn't be called for a while. It was close enough to suggest the onset of the process of morphing Georgia with North Carolina and Virginia as battleground states.
You have to figure that the Trump-in-a-pickup is less popular in Georgia today than Trump was in November 2016.
And you have to figure that Abrams is less polarizing in Georgia today than Hillary Clinton was in November 2016.
And you have to figure there'll be a turnout higher than the 2.5 million who voted in the last governor's race, if less than the 4.1 million who voted in the presidential race.
Based on all that, I believe we confront in Georgia this fall what you could call the great American political case in point.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/31/2018