Peach Tree Times

A majority of likely Georgia voters believe Major League Baseball (MLB) was “unfair” in moving this year’s All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver due to the state’s recently enacted election reform law, a newly released poll shows. 

A majority of Georgia voters support bringing the game back to Atlanta. 

Andrew Weissert, founder of ARW Strategies, the firm that conducted the poll, called the results unsurprising since the same poll shows a majority of voters supporting a key provision in the state’s new election law -- one that requires those voting by absentee ballot to provide photo ID.

“With two-thirds of Georgians supporting the state’s voter law, it’s no surprise that a majority felt that Major League Baseball’s decision to pull last week’s All-Star Game was unfair,” Weissert said in a statement released with the poll. “Based on the findings of this survey, Georgians believe Commissioner Rob Manfred should return the game to the city of Atlanta for 2023.”

The survey of 600 voters, conducted July 12-14, found that 52% of Georgians said moving the game was unfair, while 40% thought the decision was justified.  A near-equal percentage, 51%, believe Major League Baseball should return the All-Star Game to Atlanta in 2023, after it's played in Los Angeles in 2022. The All-Star Game last was played in Atlanta in 2000.

As expected the poll shows an overwhelming percentage (88%) of registered Republicans believe the move unfair, but it also shows that 68% of Latino voters believe it was unfair as did 52% of independent voters. 

The move led to a reported $100 million in lost business, and most of those hit were minority-owned businesses in the Atlanta metropolitan area, according to the Conservative Clergy of Color (CCC), a group of black pastors, priests and ministers.

"Many of these affected businesses are black-owned and located in black neighborhoods," said Bishop Aubrey Shines, chairman of CCC, in a news release announcing the group’s support for a lawsuit opposing the move. "The MLB's decision to punish these minority small businesses and residents who bear no responsibility for their state's political decisions is un-Christian and a violation of their civil rights," Shines said.

The Georgia law has been attacked for restricting voter access -- President Joe Biden called it “Jim Crow on Steroids” -- when election laws in many blue states, including Biden’s home state of Delaware, are far more restrictive.

In April, Russell Berman of The Atlantic wrote that under the new Georgia law, Georgia citizens will still have far more opportunities to vote than those in Delaware, where one in three residents is Black or Latino.

Delaware has fewer than 1 million people while Georgia has nearly 11 million.

“To Republicans, Biden’s criticism of the Georgia law smacks of hypocrisy,” Berman wrote. ‘They have a point,’ says Dwayne Bensing, a voting rights advocate with Delaware’s ACLU affiliate. ‘The state is playing catch-up in a lot of ways.’”

Moreover, Berman says Delaware does not stand alone among Democratic strongholds for restrictive voting laws.

“Although Democrats like to call out Republicans for trying to suppress voting, the states they control in the Northeast make casting a ballot more difficult than anywhere else,” he wrote.

The ARW poll had an error rate of plus or minus 4%.