Can Jeremy Hunt Unseat Georgia’s Last Rural Democrat? By Nate Hochman
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/can-jeremy-hunt-unseat-georgias-last-rural-democrat/
The young Army veteran thinks he has what it takes to score a Republican upset.
I n a nation increasingly polarized along rural–urban lines, Georgia’s second congressional district goes against the trend. Rural voters in the 2020 election broke for Republicans by overwhelming numbers: 1,302 of the 1,430 most rural counties in America were carried by Donald Trump. But out of the 127 that went for Joe Biden, three — Calhoun, Clay, and Macon — were in GA-2.
Nestled in the southwestern corner of Georgia, the second congressional district spans the western half of the state’s historic “black belt” (the term denotes a region of majority-black counties). It’s the only rural seat in the state that continues to send Democrats to Washington, D.C., and the one Republican ever to represent the district left office in 1875. But like so many rural communities across the country, GA-2 has been trending red in recent years, and the Peach State’s latest round of redistricting makes it slightly more advantageous for Republicans. The state’s new congressional map, introduced by the Republican legislature and signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp in the final days of 2021, prompted FiveThirtyEight to downgrade the district from D+6 to D+4. That two-point move to the right shifts GA-2 from the polling website’s “competitive Democrat” category to “highly competitive.”
Jeremy Hunt thinks he’s the one to pull off a Republican upset in 2022. The 28-year-old Army veteran, who announced his candidacy last week, told National Review about his two-pronged strategy: “The first is driving up Republican turnout,” he said. The second is “reaching new voters.” Hunt intends to build “a broader coalition of voters to join the conservative movement,” and he says his campaign has “a lot of momentum to do that, particularly with black voters in the area.” He sees them as “already kind of aligned with us in terms of values.”
As the son of a black pastor, Hunt is keenly attuned to his district’s culturally conservative, church-oriented voter base. He’s an affable family man, with a wife and two-year-old daughter, and his roots in the area run deep: His grandmother “was the first in our family to ever go to college, and she attended Fort Valley State University — right here in my district,” he said. “If you can imagine a black woman going to college back in the 1940s, it’s pretty remarkable.” The Hunts started the Willie Pearl Hunt Scholarship for those in the family who wanted to go to college. As Hunt said, “Only in America!”
In a district with a high rate of military service — 20.6 percent of residents in GA-2 are veterans, compared to a national average of about 7 percent — Hunt’s pedigree as a West Point graduate (he served overseas in Ukraine) could also help him connect with voters. The former Army captain was recruited to run as part of Tom Cotton’s “Veterans to Victory” program, which was rolled out last June to find and support more conservative veterans to run for Congress. The Arkansas senator told NR that the initiative isn’t “simply trying to rack up victories in deeply Republican districts . . . I also want to look for races that are winnable [in more competitive districts], if we have a high-caliber candidate who is a veteran and who’s a good fit for their communities . . . That’s the context in which we got to know Jeremy Hunt,” Cotton said.
As the first elected official to endorse Hunt, the senator told National Review that he thinks the young candidate is “positioned to win what is a tough seat against a long-term incumbent, and to help us win back the House, hopefully by a very large margin.” Asked about how he thinks a Republican like Hunt could connect in the district, Cotton added: “The No. 1 doubt that Americans have about Joe Biden and his party is that they don’t share their priorities.” Democrats are pushing an agenda of “far-left academic issues, as opposed to kitchen-table issues.”
Notably, Hunt is also a son of movement conservatism. At the age of nine, Hunt helped his father campaign as a Republican for the state House of Representatives, “knocking on doors, shaking hands, asking people to vote for my dad.” Although the elder Hunt lost that election, he was appointed to a position as commissioner of juvenile justice by Governor Sonny Perdue and stayed involved in state politics. Hunt noted that he “grew up in the pro-life movement, too — praying for the unborn and being a part of that movement was huge growing up.”
As a majority-black district, GA-2 will serve as a bellwether for the ongoing debates about the prospect of a multiracial, working-class Republican Party. Like many minority groups, blacks are a relatively socially conservative demographic. Nationwide, they attend church and pray more often than other racial groups, and their views on some social issues remain stubbornly to the right of the Democratic Party. The black population in Hunt’s home state is even more religious than the demographic’s national average: 82 percent identify as Christian, 77 percent say their religion is “very important,” and 75 percent say they pray daily.
Representative Sanford Bishop, who has held the GA-2 seat since 1993, is the longest-serving member of the Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of moderate and conservative-leaning Democrats in the U.S. House. But Hunt maintains that Bishop is out of step with the voters he represents and that he’s no Blue Dog at all: “He has a 100 percent approval rating from [the National Abortion Rights Action League]. He’s fully in the Democratic camp — the Democratic Party has purged any kind of moderate or conservative Democrats.” He believes Democratic voters are “looking for something new.”
Some indicators do show that black support for Democrats in states like Georgia is stagnating. Black Georgians, like most groups in the state, turned out to vote in higher numbers in 2020 than they did in 2016. But the black vote actually decreased relative to the rest of the Georgia electorate in 2020, falling to its lowest share of the vote since 2006. There were also signs of modest opportunities for Republican inroads: In his 2020 Senate reelection bid — which was followed by the January 2021 runoff that he lost — Republican David Perdue gained ground in 13 majority-black counties outside of Atlanta, and Trump flipped the 50-percent black Burke County in the black belt.
Still, exit polls show Biden carrying the state’s black voter base by a whopping 92 to 6 percent. No Republican presidential candidate in the last half century has managed to win more than 15 percent of the demographic. Trump gained a handful of percentage points with the group from 2016 to 2020 — particularly with black men — but blacks still proved to be the most heavily Democratic voting bloc in the 2020 election.
Hunt maintains that this is because the GOP has not reached out to black communities. The challenge is to craft an effective message. “Our message is to go and say, look: This is the movement that’s going to support your values, and we’re the movement that is going to stand up for religious liberty, stand up for your rights, and stand up for everyday families,” he told NR. “Everyone is saying the same thing: The economy has been horrible. Gas prices are ridiculous. Inflation is the highest in 40 years.” They want their representative to “actually advocate for families — not for big government or big corporations.”
Cultural issues, too, present an opening for Republicans in nonwhite communities like GA-2. Conventional wisdom in GOP strategist circles has long held that the party would need to moderate on culture — and emphasize free enterprise — to make inroads with minority voters. But blacks in Georgia, like blacks nationwide, are not cultural liberals: A 2014 Gallup poll showed 35 percent of the state’s black population identified as “conservative,” 37 percent as “moderate,” and just 19 percent as “liberal.” (In contrast, just 12 percent identified as Republican or “lean Republican,” versus 73 percent who identified as Democrat or “lean Democrat”; and 15 percent had “no lean.”) Black Georgians were more or less split on abortion, with 49 percent saying it should be legal in all or most cases and 46 percent saying it should be illegal in all or most cases. On homosexuality, 48 percent said it should be accepted, with 44 percent saying it should be discouraged. And just 38 percent favored same-sex marriage, whereas 53 percent opposed it.
At the same time, like many working-class constituencies, black Georgians are far more socially conservative than they are fiscally conservative: Just 22 percent of the demographic supports “a smaller government providing fewer services,” whereas a whopping 73 percent supports “a bigger government providing more services.” Though Hunt says “bringing new business to the district” is a big issue, in GA-2 — with more than double the national average of people living under the poverty line — the traditional Republican economic message, emphasizing tax cuts for the wealthy and welfare reform, is unlikely to resonate.
Cultural issues could also go a long way toward energizing the working-class white Republicans in the district — an important feature of Hunt’s path to victory. Whites make up around 40 percent of GA-2. Any GOP upset would require turning out voters in the deep-red rural areas.
Hunt knows his candidacy will be an uphill battle. But in a red-wave year that sees high Republican turnout alongside a shift toward the GOP among Democratic constituencies, it’s far from impossible.
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