The Republican governor of Georgia on Saturday led his attack on Major League Baseball over his decision to withdraw his All-Star Game from the state in response to a new law on voting rights.
“These are minority-owned businesses that have been hit harder by an invisible virus because of their own fault,” Brian Kemp said. “And these are the same minority businesses that are now affected by another decision that is not their own fault.”
Fox News presenter Sean Hannity thundered this week that MLB “now cost Georgia residents nearly $ 100 million in revenue.”
“Every person in Georgia must be furious,” he added.
But experts dispute that the loss of the All-Star game will have such a huge impact.
Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian this week: ‘There is some loss, so it’s not zero, but it’s much closer to zero than the number of $ 100 million that Atlanta threw around. ‘
Kemp spoke with Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, also a Republican, on Saturday at a seafood restaurant, miles from the stadium in the Atlanta suburbs where the game would be held. He said he did not think the company owned a minority.
The game is now being played in Denver. Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis has claimed the city will receive a $ 190 million economic boost.
Matheson said, “There’s no real reason to believe the economic impact numbers assigned by people who look good through large economic impact numbers.”
Kemp noted that Denver has a much smaller percentage of African Americans than Atlanta.
Critics say voting rights in Georgia will excessively affect communities of color. Aklima Khondoker, state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said Kemp’s news conference was an attempt to dismiss it while acting to try to win a second term.
“He turns away from all the malicious things we understand that this bill represents to people of color in Georgia,” she said.
Elsewhere in the state, about two dozen protesters turned up near Augusta National as the Masters Golf Championships continued, with signs saying “Let us vote” and “Voting rights on Georgia protected.”
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said he had made the decision to move the All-Star Game to talks with players and the Players Alliance, a black players’ organization founded after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, and that the league has conflicting restrictions on the ballot box.
An MLB spokesman said on Saturday the league had no immediate additional comment.
Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Georgia voting measure, which includes strict identification requirements for postal voting. It expands the early voting of the weekend, but restricts the use of ballot papers, makes it a crime to distribute food or water to queuing voters and gives the state election council new powers to enter the provincial election offices seize and replace local officials.
This has raised concerns that the Republican-controlled council could exert more influence on elections, including the certification of provincial results.
The rewriting of Georgia’s election rules – signed by Kemp last month – follows Donald Trump’s repeated lies about election fraud following his loss of Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate won Georgia, before two Democrats won Senate run-offs in January, toppling the House of Commons.
Democrats attacked the Georgia law as an attempt to suppress black and Latino votes, and Biden calls it ‘Jim Crow in the 21st Century’. Carr and Kemp blew the equation.
“This made-up narrative that this bill takes us back to Jim Crow – an era when people were killed and truly prevented from casting their vote – is ridiculous,” Carr said. “It’s irresponsible and it’s fundamentally wrong.