Ten years ago, then-Vice President Joe Biden arrived at Savannah’s bustling port and gave Georgia politicians seeking a massive dredging project everything they had hoped: unequivocal support for the $662 million plan.
The announcement was seen as a pinnacle of bipartisan cooperation, with Republican Gov. Nathan Deal and Democratic Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed uniting the political class behind the need for a deepened port — and the bounty of jobs and trade it would bring the state.
As brutal as state politics can be, economic development was one area where politicians on both sides of the aisle could reliably come together.
But sharp infighting over Georgia’s green energy boom now serves as a striking counterpoint to the bipartisan collaboration over jobs deals that was once the norm.
At a June groundbreaking for an $800 million battery supplier in Bainbridge bolstered by federal incentives, Gov. Brian Kemp lashed out at Democrats who “posture and showboat” and called his administration’s recruiters the state’s “unsung heroes.”
“When President Biden and others falsely try to take credit for Georgia’s success, don’t forget that next year is an election year,” Kemp said.
It was more than a salvo at Biden: It was also a swipe at U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, who was among the dozens in the audience that day in southwest Georgia, though he was notably not invited to address the crowd.
The Democrat spoke instead to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before and after the event, framing Kemp’s reaction as little more than a childish outburst.
“Economic development should be a team sport. So the tantrum yesterday and all the drama is just politics,” Ossoff said a day later at a stop in Metter. “It’s a collaboration, and I don’t see why there’s political drama about this.”
Theirs is a clash that will resonate through the 2024 campaign season, with Ossoff and other Democrats linking the surge of green jobs to Biden-backed initiatives that devote billions of federal dollars in spending on clean energy incentives and infrastructure improvements.
Kemp, meanwhile, says Republican policies at the state level have fostered the industry’s surge in Georgia. If the subsidies are offered nationwide, he asks, then why are so many projects picking Georgia?
‘Toxic’
The feud is also a sign of Georgia’s changing politics.
As governor, Zell Miller used to tell aides he dreamed about jobs. Sonny Perdue trumpeted a new Kia factory as a crowning economic achievement. Deal campaigned for a second term as the governor of “the No. 1 state in the nation to do business.” And Kemp fought dire predictions from Democrats that his policies would scare away investment.
“In modern Georgia history, every governor has made economic development their top priority, no matter the party,” said Craig Lesser, who led those job-seeking efforts in Perdue’s administration. “Economic development has never, for me, been a partisan issue.”
Even in the teeth of Kemp’s reelection campaign last year, Democrats rushed to join the governor to celebrate electric vehicle startup Rivian’s proposed $5 billion factory in northeast Georgia, at the time the largest single investment in state history.
(Instead, Kemp faced surprisingly sharp backlash from fellow Republicans, including former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, his GOP primary challenger, who said he would have opposed the factory and the lucrative package of incentives state and local officials dangled to seal the deal.)
But as Georgia has emerged as a premier political battleground, new lines are being drawn over the parade of green energy projects sprouting in Georgia. And Democrats are urgently tying Biden’s tax and climate change policies to the spree of announcements.
A central part of the feud is the budding rivalry between Ossoff and Kemp, who could square off against each other in 2026 when the Democrat seeks a second term. With each major jobs announcement, Ossoff seems to jockey with Kemp for attention.
The governor bristled when Ossoff trumpeted his role in Qcells’ $2.5 billion expansion of its solar business in North Georgia. And Ossoff’s exultant press release touting new details about Hyundai’s previously announced auto plant in coastal Georgia sent Kemp’s staff scrambling as the governor was completing a trade mission to Israel.
For Kemp, there are political pitfalls in positioning the state as a growing energy hub that has plainly benefited from Biden’s agenda. Instead, Kemp has said he’d support a repeal of the perks and pressed the White House to speed incentives to Hyundai that won’t kick in until the plant is finished in late 2024 or early 2025.
“Nathan Deal didn’t have higher ambitions — the governor’s job was his ultimate dream,” University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock said of the former Republican governor’s alliance with Atlanta’s Democratic mayor, who acted as an unofficial state envoy to President Barack Obama’s White House.
“Brian Kemp is keeping his future options open, and siding with Biden could be toxic to his plans,” Bullock said. “He has to constantly look over his shoulder to make sure he’s not drifting too far from his base.”
‘Zero-sum game’
Chris Riley, a former top aide to Deal, said most progress is made when politicians work together “without regard to who gets credit.” But he said governors serve as the ultimate “quarterback, cleanup hitter and closer” for economic development negotiations.
“Ossoff is very effective getting his name in the public regarding current issues, major economic development announcements and federal funding flowing to Georgia,” Riley said, adding that Kemp is “actually in the room closing the deal.”
Still, there’s no doubt that Democratic initiatives have helped foster Georgia’s green boom. Qcells directly linked its expansion announced earlier this year to the health and tax measure that Congress passed despite unanimous GOP objections.
And Anovion Technologies, the battery supplier whose Bainbridge groundbreaking was the setting of Kemp’s rebuke, noted it received a $117 million grant to spur domestic battery manufacturing in Biden’s infrastructure package.
Though both of Georgia’s future EV assembly plants were announced before the Democratic-backed laws took effect, the factories and their suppliers will benefit from the subsidies — and experts say the prospect of their passage factored into their decisions to invest in U.S. expansions.
The president’s allies say there’s more than enough credit to go around — so long as Biden and other Democrats are getting their due for the clean energy initiatives that helped spur the new investments.
“Let’s just try to throw all the politics out,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said at a town hall last week in Atlanta.
“The reality is, on the ground, we now have a policy to make sure that we can manufacture stuff in America again and be competitive globally,” she said, “and that is really a good thing for the United States.”
Bullock, the dean of Georgia political scientists, flashed back to an adage favored by the late U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson when he was one of a handful of Republicans in the Democratic-dominated Georgia Legislature: There’s no limit to what you can achieve if you don’t care who gets the credit.
“Maybe that’s changed,” Bullock said. “Now, maybe economic development is seen as a zero-sum game.”
