RÚV interviewed Rebecca Mitchell, a newly elected member of Georgia House of Representatives, who lives in the state with her husband, Icelander Ýmir Vigfússon. Rebecca said that the election in Georgia is likely to be extremely narrow, with the difference of perhaps only a thousand votes.
RÚV published the interview with Rebecca last night; at the time of writing this morning, Biden has edged ahead of Trump in Georgia and is currently ahead by 917 votes–extremely close to Rebecca’s prediction. Georgia has not elected a Democrat since 1992.
Rebecca and Ýmir are both assistant professors at Emory University in Atlanta; Rebecca a specialist in publish health with a doctorate in the spread of infectious diseases and Ýmir a computer scientist.
Rebecca explained that Georgia has a huge Democratic base but that Democrats have not always shown up to vote as much as Republicans. However, she feels that activists encouraging voters will see their work paying off. “We are dealing with a president who is not the choice of the majority of voters and we want to see change, which is why we’re swinging now in a way that we haven’t before,” she explained.
She is hopeful that the Democrats will win, saying, “It could always stay red, but given the number of ballots out right now there would need to be some additional ballot source that hasn’t been accounted for for us to not flip to blue. But the other important element is we don’t actually need to be blue; we will still win this election with the states that are blue right now. It would just be nice to see both Georgia and Pennsylvania flip because it disempowers our current president from continuing on the path that he’s con now, which is Twitter rants about stopping the count of the votes. Because if he stopped the count of the votes right now, he’s still lost.”
According to Rebecca, the political picture in the state has changed over the last 25 years as the population has grown and more people from diverse backgrounds have moved there, whilst it used to be a state where almost everyone was white.
She added at the end of the interview how difficult she thinks it will be to change the USA’s attitude to Covid-19. As an infectious disease specialist, she finds it disappointing that the battle against the coronavirus has become so political, with control measures seen as a political statement rather than a necessity. “We have to back an entire country out of that viewpoint,” she said. “That will be a gigantic uphill battle.”
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