A seemingly endless piece in The Washington Post digests the varying views and thoughts on the midterm elections specifically through the eyes of black voters in Gwinnett County, Georgia. The article mainly argues that Republicans are racist, but Democrats have their issues too. The harshest critique of the Left from the voters in Gwinnett County is that they feel like Democrats count on their loyalty but there is no quid pro quo.

Considering the source (The Washington Post), the fact that there is any criticism of the Democrat Party is astonishing. However, this is not the first time black voters have voiced concern that Democrats are not championing their issues.

What do black voters care about? The main concerns listed in the WaPo article were voting rights and policing. Other media sources list the availability of jobs, the poor economy, and a values misalignment.

This conflict can be seen particularly keenly in Georgia, where Republican Governor Brian Kemp is facing off against Stacey Abrams, and where Democrat Senator Raphael Warnock is attempting to retain his seat against Georgia football hero Herschel Walker.

Abrams gained rising Democrat star power when she declared that she had not lost her gubernatorial race in 2018; it only appeared that way because of voter suppression (for the record, she recently lost her voter suppression claim in court). She rode that horse all the way to costing Atlanta the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, which amounted to $100 million in lost revenue for business owners, many of whom are black. She also spurred on the ill-advised “defund police” movement to tragic results.

Her recent statements on the campaign trail have made her even more unpopular. First she said that ultrasound heartbeats aren’t real; they’re just manufactured sounds invented by men to force women to have their babies. Then she called all the sheriffs who have endorsed Kemp “good ol’ boys” “who want to be able to take black people off the streets [and] who want to be able to go without accountability.” Then she had the audacity to blame black men for her polling being down. She called them susceptible to “misinformation”:

Unfortunately, this year, black men have been a very targeted population for misinformation. Not misinformation about what they want but about why they want what they deserve.

She did not specify what black men were misinformed about, but hurling a vague claim like “voter suppression” got her pretty far; why not try the looming specter of “misinformation”?

The Walker/Warnock race has a very different tenor. Of the people interviewed in that Washington Post article, the overwhelming response to Walker being chosen as a candidate is that he is an ignorant amalgamation of all the harmful black male stereotypes — an absentee father with a history of violence. His being put forward as a Republican candidate is deeply insulting to the black community because of this. The irony, though, is that Warnock has a similar history of abusing his ex-wife and, even more nefariously, using his influence as a pastor to manipulate the black community and taking on that assumed virtue to reinforce the image of a black benefactor, all while pocketing money at the expense of the vulnerable.

Though Georgia’s political parties may have erred in their U.S. Senate choices, there is an overall trend throughout the other 49 states that cannot be denied.

When the black community looks at its blue-city neighborhoods — ones that have been blue now for decades — they cannot say that their lives have been made more prosperous, safe, and stable. Quite the contrary. A change is needed, and more black Americans are willing to say that. It will be interesting to see just how many black votes really did shift away from a Democrat Party that is so out of touch with their priorities.