In rural Georgia, an unlikely rebel against Trumpism
Cody Johnson leaves Beulahland Baptist Church in Beulah, Ga., where he voted in the state’s Dec. 6 runoff election for U.S. Senate. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Why didn’t the Republican red wave materialize in the midterms? The life of Cody Johnson offers one answer.
BEULAH, Ga. — As he pulled into the parking lot of Beulahland Baptist Church on Election Day last month, nearly everything about Cody Johnson suggested he would vote a certain way.
He was White. He was 33. He was an electrician with no college degree. He had a beard and a used pickup with 151,000 miles, and he was angry at what the country was becoming. Most of all, he was from northwest Georgia, a swath of rural America where people who looked like him had voted in large majorities to send Donald Trump to the White House and Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, many of them swept up in the emotional appeal at the heart of the Trump movement, which Greene now deployed in her own rallies.
“They hate you,” she would say, casting politicians as elitists, conspirators, communists, pedophiles and enemies of America — by which she always meant a certain kind of America, one that created the kind of person Johnson was expected to be.
Now he took a last inhale on his vape, walked into the polling place and voted against all of that. He voted against Greene, whom he called “an embarrassment.” He voted against the Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, because he didn’t want “some stupid s--- to happen.” He voted against every single Republican on the ballot for the same reason he supported Joe Biden in 2020, which had been the first time he voted in his life.
“I don’t want extremists in office,” he said, walking back to his truck. “And I have some small glimmer of hope that maybe things aren’t as screwed up as I think they are.”
All across the country, a similar uprising was underway as an unexpected tide of people showed up for midterm elections, turning what was supposed to be a rout for the Republican Party into a repudiation of Trumpism. In Arizona, voters rejected candidates who embraced white nationalist ideas and conspiracy theories about election fraud. In Pennsylvania, they rejected a candidate who said America is a Christian nation. Similar results had rolled in from New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and other states including Georgia, where Walker would lose in a runoff earlier this month. Even in the deep-red 14th Congressional District, Greene saw her winning margin from 2020 slip by 10 percentage points, and one reason was Cody Johnson.
Johnson, who has spent most of his 33 years in northwest Georgia, drives his truck this month near his home. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
How Johnson became an unlikely part of an emerging voter revolt against Trumpism is not so much the story of some political strategy, or even the policies of the national Democratic Party, which has long been accused of ignoring places such as northwest Georgia.
Rather, it is the story of a thousand life experiences that add up to a certain kind of American character, one that can arise from the very landscape where the Trump movement took root.
For Johnson, the process was one of slow accumulation, and to explain this, he took a drive one day, tracing a childhood across the 14th District, an area that stretches from the Appalachian foothills to the outermost edges of Atlanta’s sprawl, encompassing farms and factories and one small town after another including the one where Johnson’s first memories were formed.
He drove past the prim shops of downtown Jasper, past the gas station where his mother had worked, and the marble quarry where his father had worked for 20 years. He stopped in front of a weedy lot where his house used to be. He remembered two things.
One was his parents’ fighting, which left him with an urge for escape. The other had to do with his father, who, Johnson remembered, had him carry heavy marble blocks from one corner of the yard to another, back and forth for hours.
“I was always in trouble,” Johnson said, explaining that this was such a constant state of being that it became the bedrock of an identity. “I was the troublemaker. I guess I just always remember kind of not going with the group, no matter what.”
He continued driving down a narrow, pine-shaded road until he stopped at a cluster of low brick buildings that was a housing project where he lived after his parents divorced, and where his neighbors were White and Black and poor. He remembered two more things.
The first was the image of his mother putting away groceries in the kitchen as he tried out a racial slur he’d picked up on the playground. He remembered the box of macaroni and cheese she had in her hand at that moment, and the feeling of the box slapping his face, and the sound of her yelling, “You’re not better than anybody,” and the shame he felt as he cleaned the noodles off the floor, thinking of his best friend, who was Black, and his friend’s father, who was always helping his mother out.
The second was his elementary school principal, a woman Johnson’s wife, Aliya, now refers to as “one of those blessed souls,” who noticed that he got in trouble all the time, and instead of punishing him, gave him the first book he ever read, “The Hobbit.”
“I remember there were all these themes about fighting the Dark Lord,” Johnson said, recalling how engrossed he became in stories of characters and their moral dilemmas, which had the effect of making him think about his own.
He was driving north now through brown and yellow fields, past two gun shops, four churches and a sunken barn with a cluster of flags — the American, the Confederate, the Trump — and soon he reached the outskirts of a town called Fairmount.
He turned onto a switchback, winding higher and higher along the mountain road until it narrowed and became dirt. He stopped in front of a long, overgrown driveway leading farther up the mountainside to a shack barely visible through the trees.
He remembered having to haul plastic jugs of water to the house, which had no running water. He remembered watching rocket launches on an old television with a rabbit ear antenna. He remembered wanting to be outside all the time, away from his father, reading about someplace else.
“See that tree right there?” he said, pointing into the woods at an oddly formed, L-shaped trunk where he’d sit for hours reading his fantasy books, and looking out over the blue mountain ridges.
“Everything on the outside seemed bigger and more complex than I could imagine,” he said, and soon he was winding down the other side of the mountain, accelerating onto a two-lane headed south, leaving behind a kind of place and a kind of life he might have had.
People stake out spots in downtown Fairmount, Ga., this month as they await the town’s Christmas parade. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
It was the sort of town that dots the northern part of the 14th District toward the Tennessee line, a barely surviving place where Trump ran up 80 percent of the vote in 2020.
Fairmount had streets named for deceased factory owners, a shuttered college and the town’s last practicing doctor. There used to be carpet mills, but now there was a plant that makes powdered chlorine, and another that made bricks. An IGA grocery anchored one end of town, an American Legion post the other, and in between were three gas stations, one diner, and an intersection where locals reliably shot out the one traffic light the county kept trying to install.
“People here do not like change,” said Connie Underwood, the clerk at the Citgo, explaining life in Fairmount one day. “Like if I moved the beef jerky, they’d get mad.”
She looked out the window at the 18-wheelers growling by. Another thing about Fairmount, she said. People never escaped their nicknames. She herself would forever be known as Tractor for an incident in a farm field a decade ago. Quaalude, Zipperhead, DoNo, Whitey, Big’un, Outlaw — all were grown men still answering for their youth.
“Whatcha need?” she said now to a regular, though she could anticipate the answer.
A pack of 24/7s, a Red Bull and a Fantasy 5. A pack of Pyramids, a Yoo-hoo and a Mega Millions. “Listen,” said a woman rushing in, breathless. “I want you to call him and see if I can get some gas,” she said as the clerk texted the owner about a credit. “Please. Tell him please.”
At the diner across the street, two men were talking about a huge cattle farm on the market, which led to a discussion of their changing world, which led one of them to say, “Sometimes I think they want this whole town to die.”
At another table, a 17-year-old was scrolling on his phone, saying, “I want to go to L.A. All the famous and all the important people live out there.”
At another, a man was saying to his friend, “Did you get to hurtin’ or what?”
“Yeah, I got to lay on that thing,” said the friend, referring to an MRI machine.
“I had to go for my liver. I get paranoid. Lady said, ‘You’re going to be okay.’ I said, ‘I am not.’ I said, ‘Back this thing out.’ They backed me out of there.”
At the Marathon gas station, a clerk named Sheila Balde was trying to think of the biggest thing to ever happen in Fairmount, something involving the whole town.
“Probably the Lomax murder was one,” she said, referring to an incident in 1978, in which an intruder one morning asked to use the phone of a couple named John and Ethel Lomax, then shot and killed the husband, and shot and injured his wife. “Will never forget it, either. Everybody was terrified. I was terrified.”
She tried to think of what else. She stared out the window.
“I guess the next thing was Trump,” she finally said.
She remembered how it felt when he first came on the scene — the pickups flying Trump flags, the freshly energized conversations over morning coffee.
“It was like people woke up around here,” she said. “Bunch of people would go to the rallies and come back and talk. It just felt like he was for all of us. With Trump, it was like we could breathe.”
She thought about how it felt in Fairmount now.
“Can’t afford groceries, can’t afford gas, heating fuel is ridiculous — us poor people are dying. We’re stifled, smothered, sinking quick,” she said, turning to a regular. “What else for you, son?”
Johnson was a teenager when he moved out of the home, at left, in Rydal, Ga., where he lived with his father. “I was like, ‘Well, it’s on me now,’” Johnson said of the experience. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
Johnson was speeding away from all that now, past billboards for disability lawyers and worn-out yards heaped with old appliances, and soon, he arrived in a speck of a place called Rydal, where he lived with his father as a young teenager, during a time he could now see as pivotal to who he would become. He stopped at a plywood-patched house by some railroad tracks.