Opinion | In Georgia, Harris Supporters Pull Together and Fight the Odds

The Republicans of Forsyth County, Ga., deep in Trump country, have a peculiar problem: More and more of their white neighbors are voting for Democrats.

Forsyth County, about 40 miles north of Atlanta, was until the 1990s a whites-only suburb. Democrats don’t hold a single elected office.

But these days, some white residents are canvassing for Kamala Harris. They are joining forces with South Asians who have also moved to the area, and together reviving the county Democratic Party. In 2016, “we had $300 and seven likes on our Facebook page,” Melissa Clink, the former chair of the Forsyth County Democratic Committee, told me.

Many of them grew up somewhere else, like Jessica Fleming, a magazine editor from New York City who has had the gall to run for a seat on the county school board in the current election. “Don’t throw away your vote on a New York liberal transplant, stand with our local law enforcement!” read one text message about Ms. Fleming sent to voters in the county.

Donald Trump will almost certainly win a majority of white voters in Georgia; polls show him with a small edge in the state overall. And Forsyth County is not a battleground, yet. But in a deadlocked presidential race, even a small shift in a white-majority county could provide critical votes for Democrats in Georgia.

From 2016 to 2020, Trump’s margin of victory in Forsyth County plummeted nearly 14 points. Asian voters, who now make up about 22 percent of the county population, are driving the biggest change here. But increasingly, college-educated white voters are a key part of the coalition. Together, they are organizing arduous territory for Democrats.

The broadening coalition across the South has the potential to upend American politics: White college-educated residents — many of whom grew up outside the region — are voting with Democrats in significant numbers. In 2020, exit polls showed that 44 percent of white college-educated voters in Georgia cast ballots for Joe Biden, significantly higher than the statewide share of the white vote for him, which was 30 percent.

As the Democrats gain strength, the arrival of political competition in Forsyth County is prompting a reaction.

Since 2021, Republican-aligned activists have challenged the registration of more than 63,000 voters in Forsyth County, according to data sent to The New York Times by a member of the county’s elections board. The Republican majority in the General Assembly has redistricted Forsyth County’s state House and Senate seats, hoping to entrench the G.O.P.’s advantages.

In recent weeks, a PAC supporting State Senator Shawn Still, a Republican, mailed out fliers to residents that accused his Democratic opponent, Ashwin Ramaswami, of “soliciting children.”

“Parents beware,” the mailer reads. In fact, Mr. Ramaswami had been recruiting high school students to work on his campaign or, if old enough, vote. Mr. Still was indicted last year along with Mr. Trump on charges of illegally interfering in the 2020 election results in Georgia.

In Atlanta, Harris-Walz signs line the city streets and stand on the lawns beside welcoming porches for miles. But on a canvass in Forsyth County recently outside the town of Suwanee, white and South Asian Democrats walked the lonely streets of gated communities in the Southern heat. At the imposing front doors of mini-mansions near Old Atlanta Road, Ms. Fleming and Elaine Padgett, a Democratic candidate for the Georgia House, were only occasionally met by a friendly face. Outside the gates, Trump signs stood on many of the area’s roadways.

It felt bleak. But Ms. Padgett said things were better now than they were in 2022, when opponents tried to intimidate her. That year, she ran for a school board seat against a right-wing candidate. After she lost, a strange gift arrived in the mail: a giant chocolate molded in the shape of a penis with an explicit but anonymous note.

Political intimidation has a long history in Forsyth County.

In 1912, white residents expelled Black Americans from Forsyth County in a campaign of terror that began with the lynching of at least three Black men. When Black civil rights activists tried to mark the 75th anniversary of the expulsion in 1987, white residents attacked them with stones and Confederate flags. Oprah Winfrey later featured some of the racists on her show, where they were unrepentant. More than a century after the lynchings, the county is about 22 percent Asian. But it is less than 5 percent Black, even as nearly half of Atlanta’s population is Black.

Kannan Udayarajan, chair of the Forsyth County Democratic Committee, said a Black friend who had grown up in Atlanta warned him of the area's history when he began protesting Donald Trump four years ago by standing along Route 141 holding American and Biden flags.

“I’m proud of you, but also scared,” he recalled her telling him. Eventually though, others joined him.

Interestingly, many of the white Democrats I spoke with who were relatively new to Forsyth County said they hadn’t known this history when they moved to the area.

Ms. Fleming said she and her husband and four children had lived in their home for about a week when a longtime resident of the county stopped by to welcome them. “You’re going to love living here; it’s very safe,” she recalled him saying. “It’s the home of the Klan.” Ms. Fleming said she was shocked to learn this.

Black voters make up the backbone of the Democratic Party in the South, and the heart and soul. Alongside them has long been a small but defiant group of liberal Southern whites, many of them Jewish. Asian and Hispanic Americans are now a vital part of this Southern Democratic coalition as well. In recent decades, white college-educated voters have been moving to states like Georgia and joining this group in large numbers.

This multiracial coalition has already turned Virginia blue. In 2020 it narrowly delivered Georgia to Joe Biden. Polls suggest it will be tougher for Democrats in Georgia this year; in September, the most recent New York Times/Siena poll of Georgia showed Mr. Trump winning 49 percent of likely voters, and Ms. Harris winning 45 percent.

No matter the outcome of this year’s election, the intense reaction among Republicans in Forsyth County is a measure of this coalition’s growing power. So are the shifting politics of residents like Marcie Shaffer, a longtime Republican who voted for Kamala Harris this year.

Ms. Shaffer grew up in a conservative Republican household in a small town in Pennsylvania. As a teenager, she wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton asking him to ban abortions. In college, though, Ms. Shaffer had a sorority sister who was Black and queer. She says the experience sowed a seed of empathy. After she moved to Georgia her social circle became more diverse.

“I started educating myself on Black Lives Matter,” she said. “At first I was like, well, all lives matter,” she recalled. “But then I was like, let me figure out why people are saying this.”

In 2020, Ms. Shaffer voted for Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, but for a third-party candidate in the presidential election. Now she is attending graduate school to become a social worker, is passionate about civil and reproductive rights, and says she will never consider voting for a Republican again so long as the party continues to attack transgender Americans.

“My sister said that she’s worried about me because I’m becoming liberal,” Ms. Shaffer said. “I have never felt more at home in who I am.”

She added, “I’m doing exactly what God is calling me to do and that is to love everyone.”

A growing number of people in Forsyth County want to chart a path that diverges from the region’s history. Geoff Duncan, a former lieutenant governor and a white conservative from Forsyth County, has endorsed Kamala Harris. Better than that, he is campaigning for her.

At a Republicans for Harris event he headlined recently in Doraville, Georgia, Mr. Duncan told a small crowd of mostly other white voters that he made the decision so he could look his three sons in the eye.

“Do I want to tell them that because Donald Trump had an ‘R’ next to his name, I voted for him, I campaigned for him, I lied for him?” he asked. “The answer to that is no.”

For speaking the truth, Mr. Duncan told me, he and his wife have received death threats by phone at their home. Among Republicans in Forsyth County, Mr. Duncan is treated as a pariah. “There are certain people that won’t talk to us anymore, some folks won’t do business with you,” he said.

Views here may be changing, slowly. But Forsyth County, like much of the South, still remains treacherous territory for Democrats and those who vote with them. Political courage has been the precondition in the pro-democracy movement here. So has perseverance.

In Georgia, even the very landscape is a reminder of this fact.

Driving south from Atlanta, I saw suburban sprawl give way to cotton fields. Trump signs sat at the entrances to long driveways. Then I finally arrived in Albany, a tiny Democratic bastion surrounded by Trump country.

Outside a dated office building downtown, a small group of Black and white voters greeted one another with hugs and slaps on the back as they prepared to knock on doors and make calls for Ms. Harris. Inside, Marion and Stephen Frost, white Democrats who moved to Albany from Connecticut in 2022, mingled with the mostly Black crowd. “We moved here because we wanted more diversity and we’ve found community,” Mr. Frost said. Ms. Frost is now the secretary of the Dougherty County Democratic Committee.

A few feet away, Sandra Sallee, a lifelong liberal in Grady County, a heavily Republican area of Georgia along the Florida border, helped volunteers prepare for the canvass. When I asked Ms. Sallee, a retired teacher and librarian, what it was like to be a white Democrat in Grady County, she said it was “an honor,” and broke down in tears. Ms. Sallee, who was born and raised in Georgia, said she had ended relationships with people she loved, not over politics but the bigotry she has heard them express since Mr. Trump was elected in 2016.

“It’s almost broken my spirit,” Ms. Sallee said. “I just turned 72 and I am tired. I thought I would be playing in the woods, hiking, camping, playing with my one grandchild,” she added. “But it’s too important. I cannot stop right now. Cannot stop right now.”

Johnnie Armstrong, an 89-year-old Black man from Albany, knelt on the ground and led the group in prayer.

“Amen,” said Jon Ossoff, Georgia’s first Jewish senator, when Mr. Armstrong had finished.

The night before, I had seen Mr. Ossoff at a star-studded Harris rally outside Atlanta at which Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen had made appearances. Now he was sweating through his button-down shirt in the 90-degree heat of South Georgia, shaking hands with a line of determined Black Democrats.

Across the country, many Democrats are ridden with angst. In the South, they are knocking doors in places like Forsyth County and organizing in places like Albany, building a multiracial coalition against long odds. They are getting to work.

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