Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for June 22, 2016

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei recanted his published theory that stated the sun was the center of the world and the earth was not.

Georgia’s Trustees voted on June 22, 1737 to seek bids for building churches at Savannah and Frederica.

Georgia Whigs voted on June 22, 1775 to join a boycott against British goods. That same day, the Continental Congress approved the issuance of $2 million in debt-backed currency.

The donut was invented on June 22, 1847.

The Battle of Kolb’s Farm was fought near Marietta, Georgia on June 22, 1864.

The United States Department of Justice was established on June 22, 1870.

On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill.

On June 22, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed a law extending the 26th Amendment Right to Vote at age 18 to all federal, state, and local elections.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

Chris Burnett has been elected to Sandy Springs City Council District Three after yesterday’s runoff election.

Growing numbers of Asian and Latino registered voters isn’t likely to affect November elections very much.

According to Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office, the number of registered Latino voters jumped by about 20 percent in recent months; Asian Americans grew by 16 percent. However, the two voting blocs combined are still less than 5 percent of the state’s electorate.

“If they all showed up to vote, it probably wouldn’t affect the election outcome,” University of Georgia political science professor Tre Hood said.

Hood studies demographic voting trends. He said the increase in registered voters could be the result of a growing population.

“It’s not surprising that there are more Hispanics registering to vote,” he said. “We have an ever-increasing number of Hispanic citizens as a base in Georgia. Now, as to the motivations, I’m not sure at this point.”

Republican fundraiser Eric Tanenblatt discusses why some of his GOP colleagues may not be jumping on the Trump train.

By insisting on his ability to self-fund during the primary, Trump failed to build the kind of fundraising base that will enable him to compete on an even playing field with Clinton, said Eric Tanenblatt, a member of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s finance team and former Jeb Bush supporter.

“I was very involved in Mitt Romney’s fundraising effort in 2008, and immediately after he got out of the primary he got his team together and he said we all need to get behind John McCain, and I ended up raising more money that year for John McCain than I did for Mitt Romney by the time the election ended,” Tanenblatt said. “There wasn’t that effort with regard to the Trump campaign because the Trump campaign didn’t raise money on their own and didn’t reach out to supporters of the other candidates like donors are accustomed. Typically, the nominee is the one who is magnanimous and reaches out to the supporters of the other campaigns and unifies and works to unify the party. I don’t think that happened to the extent it should have.”

The question now, Tanenblatt said, is what Trump does going forward in terms of picking a vice-presidential candidate and what he says in public. That could determine whether his fundraising picks up or not.

“I think that says a lot about him as a candidate,” Tanenblatt said. “That’s probably the biggest decision that he’s going to make in the campaign, so that will send a signal.”

Georgia Republican Party First Vice Chair Michael McNeely may or may not have been asked to leave the backstage area at the Trump event at the Fox Theater. From Buzzfeed,

Michael McNeely, the first vice chair of the Georgia Republicans, was escorted out of Atlanta’s Fox Theatre by Secret Service after being told there was “no more room for you” by Trump campaign state director Brandon Phillips, according to a party official briefed on the incident. The official requested anonymity said they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the party.

McNeely was stopped while trying to enter an area where Trump had been greeting supporters, the sources said. Neither Phillips, the Trump campaign, nor the Georgia Republican Party returned messages seeking comment.

So, “a party official briefed on the incident” who requested anonymity. Third party rumor-mongering at best.

In a move that has nothing to do with his coming in second in the primary election and headed into a July 27 runoff, incumbent Cobb County Commission Chair Tim Lee will propose lowering the property tax millage rate.

Due to an increase in the county’s property values, Cobb Commission Chairman Tim Lee said on Tuesday he will propose reducing the county’s tax rate by 0.5 mills, a rate commissioners are scheduled to vote on next month.

The county’s 2016 preliminary tax digest, which is the total value of all property within the county, is estimated to be 8.5 percent higher than 2015’s digest.

Due to homestead and other exemptions, the net increase in taxable properties is estimated to be about 3 percent, Lee said. The final digest is expected to be approved today by the Cobb Board of Tax Assessors.

As a result of that growth, Lee told the MDJ on Tuesday he is set to propose a general fund millage rate of 6.82 mills — down from the current 7.12 mills — while the fire service rate and debt service rate would each go down by 0.1 mill to 2.96 and 0.23 mills, respectively.

“To the naysayers that say this is all politics, well, no, because I did it a year ago,” Lee said. “We made a decision — my recommendation to the board and they adopted it — a year ago, to adopt a budget with a reduced millage rate and work towards that in anticipation of growth in the digest, based on the economic activity that we started to see the year prior.”

Population growth in Georgia has begun again after lagging during the recession. Most of the growth is concentrated in a small number of counties while more than half of Georgia counties lost population.

About two-thirds of Georgia’s growth is now happening in just six of the state’s 159 counties, said Matt Hauer, a demographer with the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government.

Those include five metro Atlanta counties and Chatham County.

And half the state’s population growth is concentrated in just three Atlanta metro counties — Fulton, Gwinnett and Forsyth, Hauer found when he analyzed U.S. Census data.

Many other counties are adding more people, including Clarke County. Clarke is now one of the state’s fastest-growing counties, adding more than 1,100 people from 2015 to 2016, and could be close to 130,000 people four years from now, according to population projections of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget.

But Hauer was surprised to find nearly half of Georgia’s 159 counties were actually losing population in the first part of this decade. Between 2010 and 2013, 82 Georgia counties, many of them rural, lost population. More than two dozen of them saw negative growth of 10 percent or more. From 2000 to 2010, 30 counties lost population, most of them in southwest Georgia.

Georgia’s population of people 65 years and older will double over the next five decades, Hauer said. The number of people 18 to 64, the working years, will increase only 4 percent, however, he said.

White people make up the majority of the state’s population, but at the current rate of change, by around 2030 Georgia will be a “majority-minority” state where the number of people in minority racial groups is greater than the number of white people.

The two new reactors being built at Plant Vogtle won’t be the only new nuclear power design in Georgia, as Congress approved $1.48 billion for reactor design work for the submarines slated to replace Ohio-class subs at Kings Bay.