“It feels a little bit like a slap in the face,” one Georgia Dem. operative said. “There’s the symbolism to consider...and I think it would have been a strong statement to say, ‘Hey, Georgia has delivered for us, and we’re not taking that for granted.’”
Southern Democrats are fuming over their party’s decision to hold its 2024 national convention in Chicago instead of Atlanta, seeing the move as a slight against a city and state that helped deliver Democrats both the White House and their current Senate majority.
“It feels a little bit like a slap in the face,” one Georgia Democratic operative said. “You know, there’s a lot that goes into this — hotels and transportation and all that. But there’s the symbolism to consider too, and I think it would have been a strong statement to say, ‘Hey, Georgia has delivered for us, and we’re not taking that for granted.’”
A January letter to Biden from more than 65 current and former Democratic federal, state and local officials in the South put that argument into stark relief, telling the president that “everything we have accomplished as a party since January of 2021 can be traced back to Georgia, and specifically, to the metro Atlanta area which swung the state in our favor.
Kendra Cotton, the CEO of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, said that she was “disappointed” by the decision to give the convention to Chicago, especially given the critical role Georgia played in Biden’s 2020 presidential bid. “This is nowhere near enough to meet delegates’ needs. Union delegates and guests who choose union hotels as a matter of conscience would need to compete over limited rooms. Not every state delegate and visitor who wanted to show labor solidarity would be able to do so,” the letter reads, also calling the price point of the hotels a burden for some.
“That feels just really disingenuous because you’re punishing people who work really hard for the Democratic Party because their state has really crushed the union movement,” the Georgia Democrat said. “And to say that because the city of Atlanta didn’t do enough to magically create unions or union hotels overnight, that they should be disqualified, it’s just insulting. It’s insulting to organizers across the South who live in states where Republicans want to destroy the union movement.
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