A barbershop debate

Atlanta, Georgia – At a barbershop in the suburbs of Georgia’s capital, a debate has sparked over a trim.

Fifty-four-year-old owner Goody does not believe Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump can make meaningful inroads with Black voters like himself, in the final stretch before the United States’ presidential election on November 5, despite what recent polls may show.

His regular customer, 53-year-old Gardy Leandre, a private tax director who moved to the US from Haiti while in high school, disagrees.

“I’m telling you as a taxman, I know he did great things by bringing the economy back,” he said of Trump’s time in office, which ended after he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020.

Goody pushed back, reminding his old customer of the many controversies surrounding Trump, both during his presidency and since.

What about Trump’s comments on Haitian immigrants, falsely suggesting they eat pets? Leandre tells him Haiti would be better off under Trump, and that he wouldn’t actually get rid of immigrants who work.

What about Trump’s response to the disastrous Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico in 2017, when he threw paper towels at a crowd of people in need? Leandre pivots and talks about support for small business owners.

What about the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, when Trump supporters overran the building as politicians inside ratified Biden’s win?

“I’m not going to give him a pass on that,” Leandre told Al Jazeera. “But at the end of the day, if I want my 401(k) [retirement savings] to go up, if I want to put food on my table for my kids, I gotta go for Trump.”

Goody grows exasperated. What about Trump’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic? What about the Muslim ban?

“I understand all the nastiness about Trump, trust me,” Leandre finally said. “But there’s an election Trump, and there’s President Trump.”

Holding clippers to Leandre’s head, Goody was incredulous.

“Man, you were in New York for the Central Park Five,” he told Leandre, referring to Trump’s racist campaign against a group of young Black and Hispanic men wrongfully convicted of a brutal New York City rape in 1989.

“Trump was bred off racism.”

The conversation, under an LED halo light and across from a faded poster of the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, circled questions that could determine which way Georgia goes in the upcoming presidential election. The answers could, in turn, make the difference in who enters the White House.

Will Georgia see the record level of Black and minority engagement that was a cornerstone of the coalition that delivered the key battleground state to Democrats in 2020, for the first time in 18 years?

And if that engagement does reach or exceed those levels, will Black voters’ new electoral muscle in the state still be used to achieve a victory for Democrat Kamala Harris?

Increasing strength

Georgia’s already significant Black population exploded between 2000 and 2020, with Black residents making up about 48 percent of the state’s growth in eligible voters – 920,000 new Black voters to be precise – during that period, according to the Pew Research Center. As of 2022, Georgia had 2.6 million eligible Black voters.

The growth of the demographic has radically altered politics in what had previously been a reliably Republican state.

In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams almost won the governorship, fuelled by the minority voter engagement organisation she founded, the New Georgia Project.

The success of those efforts was seen in 2020. Black voter turnout in the metro Atlanta area – which accounts for 60 percent of Georgia’s overall electorate – increased by 32 percent compared to 2016.

More than half of the 2020 ballots cast for Biden were cast by Black voters, with 89 percent of the overall Black vote in Georgia going to Biden and 11 percent going to Trump, helping to fuel a wider Democratic shift across the state, which included picking up both seats in the Senate.

But, with Biden only winning Georgia by just shy of 12,000 votes last time, Democrats face a tough job holding off the Republicans.

A slump in support

Down the street from Goody’s shop in the majority Black suburb of Austell, Trump supporters were gathering at a church for a campaign event headlined by Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.

Inside the red-bricked, white-steepled Embassy ATL church, its founder, Bishop B Dwayne Hardin, served as emcee for the “Believers for Trump” event, which featured GOP Chairman Michael Whatley, evangelical leader Ralph Reed, and former state representative turned Trump staffer Scott Turner.

The church serves mostly Black congregants, but the crowd attending the event were racially mixed. Among them was Alveda King, the niece of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, who has become a prominent conservative figure for her anti-abortion campaign.

“In case you guys didn’t know, I am a Black man,” Hardin said at one point in the event, which otherwise focused on the typical “Make America Great Again” campaign fare that has defined Trump’s politics for nearly a decade.

“And I renounce the rebuke that I received the other day.”

Hardin was referring to former US President Barack Obama, who has been recently deployed by the Harris campaign – among an array of surrogates – to shore up Black support in the final days of the race.

Speaking directly to young Black men in Pittsburgh in early October, Obama suggested sexism was to blame for an apparent slump in Black support for Harris, particularly among Black men. That slump has been shown in recent New York Times/Siena and Pew Research Center polling.

“You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody [Trump] who has a history of denigrating you,” Obama said, “because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?”

The Times/Siena poll released in early October found that 80 percent of Black voters nationwide support Harris. That’s an increase from the 74 percent of Black voters who supported Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.

Still, it’s a marked decrease from the 90 percent of the Black vote Biden received nationally in 2020. In turn, 15 percent of Black voters said they would vote for Trump, the poll found, a marked increase from the 9 percent he carried nationally in 2020.

Trump’s campaign – and his prominent Black surrogates – have repeatedly seized on Obama’s words as evidence Democrats have taken their key demographic for granted.

The Times/Siena poll indicated the messaging might not be so far off the mark: 45 percent of Black voters under 30 rated Republicans as more likely to follow through on campaign promises than Democrats.

Outside of the “Believers for Trump” event, Black attendees also shared a similar sentiment.

“The governance of the country over the last year has not been good,” said 80-year-old George Smith, who predicted more Black voters will be motivated by immigration and by the economy to move towards Trump.

“Everything is not always colour focused,” he said as the sun set on Austell. “That’s the problem we have today in our system … If you disagree with someone, then there’s something wrong with you.”

‘We only had one choice’

In the cold light of day, on a crisp morning of early voting at CT Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center in southwest Atlanta, Black voter after Black voter pointed to any number of reasons they saw another Trump presidency as unacceptable.

That included Trump’s past cosiness with far-right and white supremacist groups, his election denialism, his racially tinged attacks on adversaries, his claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets or even his ham-fisted pledge to protect “Black jobs”, to name a few.

“To me, we only had one choice, and that was Kamala,” said Carolyn Sanders, a retired telecommunications worker. “We can’t go back to the racism, the hurting people.”

Her son, 47-year-old truck driver Detoine Sanders, added: “And it was blatant. We understand that this country has racism, based on the systems it was found on, [slavery], but people were really just coming out and saying what was on their mind.”

Other voters in Atlanta, a city studies show continues to have some of the highest rates of racial and economic inequality in the country, struggled to see why Trump was being viewed as better for the economy – and working people – than Harris.

While the Biden administration, for which Harris serves as vice president, has struggled with inflation and higher prices on basic goods than those seen under Trump, both Harris and the former Republican president have laid out populist-leaning economic proposals aimed at winning the votes of working Americans.

Harris has vowed to create an “opportunity economy”, which would include a first-of-its-kind ban on price gouging, extra assistance to first-time homebuyers, child tax credits and increased taxes on corporations – with cuts for the middle class.

Most recently, she laid out an economic proposal specifically aimed at Black men – another first – that would offer special loans to Black entrepreneurs, seek to address health issues that disproportionately affect Black men, and federally legalise marijuana.

For his part, Trump has vowed to end taxes on tips, Social Security and overtime, while imposing more tariffs to force corporations to manufacture inside of the US.

Echoing President Obama, 43-year-old Carla Travis, an office manager who voted with her wife, said she believed Harris – the former top prosecutor of California – is receiving extra scrutiny as a Black woman. Travis was adamant that a Black man in Harris’s position would not see the same softening of support.

“Sexism exists, and unfortunately it’s a reality in our community,” she said, adding that both parties have struggled to speak to the complexities of the overlapping perspectives of Black identity.

Squinting in the morning sun, voter Kyle Poag, a 31-year-old truck driver, said he had little faith either candidate would make a meaningful difference in his life, but he decided to vote “to assert what little influence I can in this messed-up system”.

He declined to say who he voted for, but added: “I understand why some people might [have voted for Trump], but there are things that are more important than dollars.”

In nearby Gwinnett County, part of the swiftly diversifying sprawl of Atlanta’s wider metro region, 30-year-old Brandon Davenport said a single policy point won his vote, and would have done so regardless of the candidate’s race or gender.

“I’m always working, and I’m always trying to put in extra hours of overtime,” said Davenport, who works in a tire shop. “I’m not saying that everything he said is dead on the money, but [Trump] got me on the overtime tax cut.”

‘Black people recognise their power in Georgia’

Back in southwest Atlanta, under the stained-glass crucifix at Flipper Temple AME Church, activists took part in a simple act of defiance.

Standing four by four in parallel lines in front of the early voting site, organisers passed plastic bottles of water to voters. The act was bookended by a prayer and gospel tune.

Through the small gesture of handing out water, the group intentionally violated SB202, a sweeping election law passed by Republicans in Georgia in the wake of the 2020 vote. It is among several bills passed across the country that voting rights advocates have said disproportionately disenfranchise minority voters.

One measure prohibits – in most circumstances – giving food or water to those waiting in line at polling sites. The longest wait times – which in the past have been up to 10 hours – are typically found in denser urban areas, where there are large minority populations that tend to skew Democratic.

“We know that laws like this that are spreading across the country are immoral, but that’s somewhat hard to see,” said Nicole Carty, a 36-year-old local organiser with the Get Free movement. “So as Dr [Martin Luther] King would say, ‘It’s important to dramatise the issue’.”

Pointing to Georgia’s storied role in the US civil rights movement, Gerald Griggs, the president of Georgia’s NAACP, said he believes any measures that could limit Black voters will be met, instead, by increased Black engagement.

Beyond SB202, other recent measures have removed ballot drop-off boxes from some areas and attempts to require more proof of identification for some voters – also seen as disproportionately affecting minorities.

“The easiest way to get Black people to become less disillusioned is to show that they are trying to take away that most precious right,” Griggs said.

He was confident that Black churches and groups like the Georgia Voting Project and Black Voters Matter – along with the Divine Nine, a collection of elite Black college fraternities and sororities – had developed “surgical” voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations that could win any election for any candidate able to enthuse minority voters.

But he was also aware that modern wins for federal legislation that would directly address issues faced by Black residents of the US remain rare. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 have languished amid congressional opposition, while Biden’s signature student loan forgiveness programme was largely neutered by the courts.

The federal gridlock can translate to disillusionment on the ground. Despite the recent increases in Black voters – who already turned out at higher rates than white voters – hundreds of thousands of possible Black voters remain untapped, he said.

“I think Black people recognise their power in Georgia and are exercising it in a way that’s sending a message to the rest of the country,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But we need concrete legislation,” he said. “The problem is the couch is still running a strong race.”

Both presidential campaigns – and groups working on their behalf – have launched special Black outreach efforts in the final days of the race. Both candidates have recently visited Atlanta, and have touted smaller “listening sessions” with Black men at bars and barbershops across the state.

But Jacqueline Lamar, a home health aide from the metro Atlanta city of Covington, also said she has been struck by high levels of disillusionment as she advocates for Harris in the final days of the race.

“I was doing phone banking the other day, and it saddened me that so many Black and brown people were telling me on the phone that they don’t want to vote,” she told Al Jazeera. “They just see it as two people yelling and they don’t want to be a part of it.”

Lamar had worked for an agency making just $9 an hour before she herself suffered a stroke and required care. Unable to afford her own home health worker, she saw the burden fall on her daughters.

She has been particularly motivated by Harris’s proposal to expand Medicare to cover home healthcare – an industry that is dominated by Black and minority women. She hopes her personal story can connect with those considering sitting out the election.

“Anybody can talk slick, and tell you some good stuff and get your attention,” Lamar, who organises with the Care in Action group, told Al Jazeera. “But people need to see it means something.”

‘We need a change’

Black population growth in Georgia has been largely fuelled by what has been described as a “reverse northern migration”, a reference to the mass exodus of Black residents facing racist policies in the US South throughout the 20th century.

Many have returned to the Atlanta area, both for its cultural significance and the growing technology, transportation and film industries.

The growth has been buoyed – to a smaller extent – by new immigrants. In combination, the rapid increase in Georgia’s Black, Hispanic and Asian population has put Georgia on track to soon become a minority-majority state. Some argue it has already reached that point.

In the northwestern cities near Atlanta, another organisation is trying to turn out an often overlooked demographic that spans several minority groups: Muslim voters, a large proportion of whom are Black.

“A lot of the activism is usually framed through the Christian lens. But there has been a history of Muslim activism in Atlanta and in America, going back to Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders,” said Xan-Rhea Bilal, a 29-year-old senior organiser with the Georgia Muslim Voter Project.

“Civic engagement and voting is one of the tools in our toolbox that we can use to achieve the things that we need,” said Bilal, whose parents are originally from Trinidad, her mother a Christian, her father a Muslim.

She added that there are an estimated 200,000 Muslims in Georgia, with 90,000 registered to vote.

“The margin of the presidential election for 2020 was less than 12,000 votes, right? So just with that map alone, you can see that we do have the power to impact the margins.”

On an afternoon in late October, three members of the organisation made their way through an overgrown and crumbling apartment complex in Clarkston, often considered one of the most diverse cities in the country.

They urged the mostly Somali American residents they encountered to attend a listening session with local candidates and handed out voting information. The group is non-partisan, and does not endorse candidates.

Warsammeh Bured, a 54-year-old immigrant from Somalia, said he has felt left behind by all levels of government as his living environment has deteriorated around him.

“We came out from a war in Africa … but you see the situation we are in here. We were not expecting to live life like this in America.”

“It’s the housing crisis in America. The cost of living is going up, the cost of gas [petrol], everything is going up, but the paycheque is not increasing,” he said, estimating he would need to spend his entire monthly salary from working at a warehouse on rent if he were to move.

“We need a change. Trump is a businessman, he only cares about businessmen. We need someone who cares about the normal community – low-income people,” he said.

“It’s time to choose the president of the United States to be a woman.”