SMYRNA, Ga. (AP) — The front desk of a Metro Atlanta office suite is a veritable museum of Herschel Walker’s football success for the University of Georgia Bulldogs and the NFL. The office is part of the Atlanta Braves’ real estate development in the Major League Baseball franchise’s new suburban home.
This headquarters of Georgia’s Republican candidate for the US Senate isn’t officially dedicated to athletics, of course. Still, the location and setting help show that a lot of professional sports and college loyalties explain the political divisions in this battleground state, where Walker is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in a runoff on Tuesday.
“Sports is a cultural identifier, and in the South, college fandom is a big part of that,” said David Mowery, a University of Georgia alumnus, avid Bulldogs supporter and now Alabama-based political consultant who works with Republicans and Democrats. “Now our politics and our campaigns are so identity-focused,” Mowery said. “We see all of these overlaps.”
Sports and politics have long intersected in America. But the flashpoints — racial segregation of college campuses and professional leagues, the use of Native American mascots and imagery, athletes protesting civil rights, power struggles over taxpayer funding for stadiums — are still present in Georgia.
For Republicans, whose coalition is older, whiter and less urban than the general population, that means an open embrace of baseball’s Bulldogs and Braves, each with fanbases that tend to be whiter and more suburban. and rural. And it wasn’t just Walker, who carried the Bulldogs to the national championship in 1980 and won the Heisman Trophy two years later.
“Big politics, great place to campaign,” Governor Brian Kemp, a UGA alum, said as he followed supporters in Athens ahead of a game against Georgia earlier this season.
The Governor grew up in Athens and is close to the family of late Bulldogs coach Vince Dooley. His wife, Marty, was a Georgian cheerleader when she was a student, he reminded reporters as he previewed the Bulldogs’ prospects in 2022. The defending national champions, he said. – he says, “have the players” but “must stay humble”. (They won the Southeast Conference championship on Saturday.)
Kemp and Lieutenant Governor-elect. Burt Jones, who also played for Georgia, joins Walker in using red and black as campaign colors. Attorney General Chris Carr, who won a second term in November, sometimes calls himself a “Double Dawg” — the honorary title for someone with two UGA degrees.
The Democrats’ coalition, meanwhile, is rooted in metropolitan areas and non-whites, who now make up around 4 in 10 Georgian voters. So when politicians like Warnock incorporate sports into their campaigns, it’s to pass in an Atlanta sports bar during the recent World Cup soccer match between the United States and Iran.
Warnock will campaign in Athens on Sunday. But on Saturday, when Walker was at the SEC Championship Game, Warnock was at Augusta. The senator visited his alma mater, the historically Black Morehouse College, on homecoming weekend this fall, but he notes, with a mixture of earnestness and humor, a different focus and scale.
“You know what it’s like if you go … to an HBCU football game,” Warnock said at an HBCU Fraternities and Sororities campaign event. “It’s not just a game, it’s a fashion show and the battle of the bands.”
2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter explained Georgia politics by citing Atlanta’s professional football team and its demographically diverse fans. “Stacey needs Atlanta United’s vote,” he would say of Stacey Abrams, who lost to Kemp in 2018 and 2022.
Certainly, there are white football fans in Republican-leaning suburbs and Democrats, white and black, who love the Bulldogs and Braves. One of Warnock’s top aides organized ‘Dawgs for Abrams’ as a UGA undergraduate in 2018. Nonetheless, the partisan divide of campaign styles dovetails with race and geography, even though it is not explicit.
When Walker and Kemp chose campaign offices close to each other in the Cobb County development of the Braves, Republicans described a simple decision to be near the northern suburbs of metro Atlanta, so essential to their winning coalition. The Braves themselves had done the same math, leaving town in 2017 after half a century and explaining the surprise move by saying they would be closer to most of their season ticket holders. (Cobb County politicians also gave the team more than $400 million in stadium funding, which Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed refused to do. Reed instead directed the money from the city to renovate a downtown arena for the NBA Hawks.)
Perhaps most notably, the Republican embrace of the Braves has been accompanied by controversies over Native American imagery in sports and a separate political storm over the Republicans’ 2021 overhaul of Georgia’s election laws.
Democrats, including Warnock, called the law “Jim Crow 2.0,” saying it made it harder for some black voters to vote. Georgian companies Delta and Coca-Cola have criticized the law. The Braves stayed out of the fray. But Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred moved the 2021 Cobb County All-Star Game in response. Kemp blamed relentlessly “woke” Democrats, though Warnock and Abrams did not call for change.
The two Democrats also haven’t said the Braves should change their name or drop the fans’ “Tomahawk Chop” at home games, but others, including Biden’s White House, have said changes should. be on the table.
“He has to come out and say, does he think they should change the name. Well, I don’t,” Walker said during an appearance on Fox News. When Warnock largely ignored the issue, an aide to Walker tweeted that the senator “must be a Mets fan.”
Yet it is unmistakably Walker’s football acclaim that forges a unique bond between a black conservative and a multi-generational white political base.
“When I was in high school, Herschel Walker was the biggest name in town,” Republican National Committee member Ginger Howard said of the 1980 championship season. Now, she says, her young nephews say enthusiastically: “Ginger, you know Herschel!
On Saturday, Zach Jacobs and Zach Adams, 23, from the Atlanta suburb of Woodstock, waited near the downtown Mercedes Benz-Stadium to take a photo with Walker. Both voted for their footballing heroes in the general election and said they would do so again on Tuesday.
“He’s a people man, he just connects with who Georgia is,” Jacobs said.
Walker has at times spoken of being part of the first generation of black players at UGA, which was founded in 1785. Dooley, who endorsed Walker before the iconic coach’s death in October, initially offered scholarships to black athletes in 1971. Walker was 8 years old. .
Warnock, born in 1969, was not a star athlete and enrolled at Morehouse, which opened during post-Civil War reconstruction, a founding legacy that Warnock alumni say supersedes athleticism.
“We have a motto, a program: ‘A people without a vote is a people without hope,'” Marcus Montgomery said of the Alpha Phi Alpha fellowship he shares with the senator.
Adams, a white UGA graduate, recognized Warnock’s deep Georgian roots. But, pointing to the surrounding downtown Atlanta, he said, “Herschel is the man who can make all of this, and the rest of Georgia, better.”
Walker’s election night celebration will take place near downtown Atlanta, just blocks from the Warnock Party. That’s a change from Walker and Kemp’s Nov. 8 deals adjacent to the Braves’ stadium. But the former star running back doesn’t necessarily break the mould. His place this time: the College Football Hall of Fame.
Bill Barrow, l’Associated Press
