05/14/2026
Today's newsletter is the hardest one I've written.
On Tuesday, Governor Brian Kemp signed House Bill 369 into law. The bill makes most local elections nonpartisan in exactly five Georgia counties: Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and Clayton. Georgia has 159 counties. The bill applies to five of them. The five that voted Democratic in 2024. The five whose elected district attorneys are all Black women.
Both political parties are about to lie to you about what this means.
Democrats will tell you it is racism. Republicans will tell you it is good governance. Both framings are missing the deeper story, and I refuse to run either one of them on this newsletter.
Here is what is actually happening. Republicans in the Georgia General Assembly decided their political problem was that Democrats kept winning in five counties. They used a procedural workaround to weaken the incumbents who were beating them. That is power consolidation, not racial animus. And the Democratic Party's response, which will dominate the next news cycle, will use the racial identity of the targeted DAs to mobilize Black voters for the midterms.
I have spent the last sixty years watching the Democratic Party use race as a turnout tool while material outcomes for Black Americans have not improved. The reading scores have not improved. The single-parent rates have not improved. The incarceration rates have not improved. The culture of the "community" has not improved. What has improved is the Democratic Party's ability to fundraise off the next outrage. HB 369 is on schedule.
In 2024, twenty-one percent of Black men voted for Donald Trump. Up from thirteen percent in 2020. Up from eight percent in 2016. The highest GOP share of the Black male vote in forty-eight years. That shift was not Black men suddenly discovering an affinity for Trump. It was Black men finally noticing that the party they had voted for at eighty-six percent in 2020 was not actually building anything for them.
Today's newsletter goes through all of it. The Kemp bill. The Louisiana redistricting fight under the new Supreme Court framework. The federal gas tax holiday Trump proposed Monday. The Georgia state gas tax suspension that expires next Monday, May 19, that Governor Kemp has still not said publicly whether he will extend. The Federal Reserve transition. The Texas school enrollment collapse that should be on every Georgia parent's radar.
The newsletter is free. There is no paywall. There are no sponsors. There is no agenda except the truth.
If you have ever wondered why the national conversation about politics never seems to match what is actually happening in your community, this newsletter is built for you.
Read it here: barrington.substack.com
And if it gives you something you did not have before you read it, share it with one person today. That is how this grows. Through trust.
The Pain of Truth.
— Barrington Martin II
Host, The Barrington Report 24/7
on X
ATL Talks Radio, every Thursday
