Republicans and Democrats used the final weekend of early voting to urge Glynn County residents to cast ballots in what is expected to be a razor-tight race for Georgia’s sixteen electoral votes for president.
In 2016, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by almost 29% of the vote in Glynn and four years later beat Joe Biden by 23% of the nearly 42,000 votes cast in the county. The former president is expected to prevail again this year in this heavily Republican county.
But statewide, the race between the former president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris could be decided by the narrowest of margins. That’s why in even as red a county as Glynn, both campaigns are scrambling for votes.
On Saturday morning, the First African Baptist Church, just off Amherst Street in Brunswick, hosted a “Souls to the Polls” rally, offering hot dogs, hamburgers and encouragement to prospective voters before they boarded a bus for the short ride to the nearby county board of elections office.
“I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but you know what has to be done,” Regina H. Johnson, a retired Glynn County school teacher, told the mostly pro-Kamala Harris crowd.
Johnson also explained the amendments on the ballot, including a proposed Educational Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) of 1%. “That’s one cent on every dollar spent here in Glynn County…and that goes for anybody who visits,” she said.
For Charlie Middlebrooks, in particular, Saturday was a landmark day.
The 19-year-old recent graduate of Brunswick High was aboard the first shuttle leaving the church and cast his first vote. He was driven, he said, to ensure Trump would not return to the White House.
“The whole thing about how he’s a millionaire — he was born with the money and Kamala Harris had to work her way up. And that relates to a lot of us here, including myself, because we didn’t start out with all that money. Growing up, you got to work, work your way up. That’s the way I was taught. The way a real man does it,” Middlebrooks said.
‘Slept her way to the top’
Keen to win over the undecided and uncommitted, especially in the county’s Black community, Republicans were busy over the weekend, too.
A former reality court television judge Joe Brown was the featured speaker at a Sunday rally at Brunswick’s Selden Park. He appeared as part of a five-city tour of Georgia organized by MAGA Black Georgia that includes stops in Rome, Marietta, Savannah and Thomasville.
Brown excoriated Harris, repeating baseless allegations and smears that Trump has often voiced during campaign rallies.
“Now I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have a successful billionaire who’s manipulated all of that running the U.S. government as the chief administrative officer than somebody that has never done that in their lives, that has slept her way to the top,” he told the audience of about 45 people, eight of whom were Black.
Brown suggested that Harris was physically unfit to serve as president, though her campaign released a doctor’s report earlier this month that she is in “excellent health” and “possesses the physical and mental resilience required to serve as president.”
“Some doctor friends of mine tell me that her word salad thing is the result of something they call early onset dementia. It starts in the mid-50s, and maybe it might hit by the early 60s, but she’s 60 years old this month,” Brown said. “It is very alarming.”
Trump has released very little health information, including after his ear was grazed by a bullet during an assassination attempt in July in Pennsylvania.
Brown’s audience was made up almost entirely of White — and very vocal — Trump supporters. For some, however, their backing of the former president wasn’t unqualified.
“Do I find him disgusting at times? Yes, I do. I find his rhetoric to be disgusting at times. I find the name-calling to be disgusting at times,” Carolyn Fisher admitted. “‘[But] I like what he says he is going to do, and I’ve seen him do it between 2016 and 2021. I saw what he did, and I want that back again.”
But Brown’s talking points about uncontrolled immigration and voting by illegal migrants resonated deeply with the 74-year-old Fisher, a resident of St. Simons.
“I’m afraid. I am terrified about the illegal migrants that are coming across our borders, about people who are not even citizens that are voting. I am terrified about it,” she said.
Gordon Rolle, the head of MAGA Black Georgia, vouched for Brown.
“You know, there’s no difference between him and a college professor as far as the information he has to present, but he gets a lot of information from historical documents, but a lot of information that he gives, if you notice that comes from first-hand knowledge of this.”
A former Democrat, Rolle was approached by the Virgina-based MAGABlack to develop an outreach program for Georgia that would target Black males between the ages of 18 and 34.
But feeling that Trump was “the right choice” and frustrated that nonprofits like MAGABlack are barred by law from endorsing presidential candidates, Rolle divorced himself from MAGABlack and moved to MAGA Black Georgia.
“After the election, what we want to do is have an establishment in each community that we’ve been in contact with, and we invite other communities to reach out to us because we consider ourselves an umbrella organization,” he said.
