Ryan Wilson is having a good year.
After regaining control of his member networking space in December, he said the Gathering Spot’s revenue has reached $20 million and continues to grow. The Atlanta-based company now plans to open a fourth location in Houston next year.
But like many small business owners in the capital of Georgia, where President Joe Biden And Donald Trump Gathering Thursday for their first debate on the 2024 race, Wilson said his priorities as a voter go beyond his bottom line.
He applauds the Biden administration’s efforts to expand federal student loan relief and access to capital for entrepreneurs, for example. “Those are the kinds of things that move things” for the business community in general, said Wilson, who is hosting a debate watch party Thursday night at the Gathering Spot.
Today, Trump leads Biden in Georgia 43% to 38%, according to a new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of likely voters, a lead just outside the 3.1% margin of error. The swing state’s robust but uneven economic recovery makes it a Rorschach test for residents heading to the polls this fall — creating an opening for both campaigns’ messaging. Georgia is in the middle of a startup boom. Business formation peaked at 320,000 new filings in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, and has since reached near-record levels. The state’s business environment, with its generous tax breaks for the entertainment industry and a business ecosystem anchored by Atlanta stalwarts Coca-Cola and Home Depot, has been ranked first in the nation by the magazine in each of the past ten years Area Development.
Wilson, 34, plans to vote for Biden, but he believes the president should do more to highlight entrepreneurial provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, among other things. “The legislation has been passed. It is meaningful,” he said.
Still, he worries that “we’re not having this conversation based on what should be publicly available facts,” citing misinformation that the White House has so far refrained from confronting. Not everyone agrees.
“I don’t like what Biden is doing,” said Deonte Atkins, 37, owner of Za’Acai Cafe in Midtown Atlanta, which he opened just six months ago. “Trump may be divided and dividing the city, but Joe Biden divided the world.” Atkins also sees strong business. Sales have nearly doubled to “six figures,” he said, and he’s already building a pizzeria and a speakeasy-style event space adjacent to the acai bowl spot.
But Atkins attributes his successes more to Atlanta’s entrepreneurial scene than to any federal policy, and he’s more focused on geopolitical issues anyway. After he and his fiancée welcomed a baby in March, he worries about American involvement in Ukraine or Israel.
“It really comes down to who can help you achieve your goals,” he said, adding, “For me as an entrepreneur, I don’t want to see a war for me or my children.” Both campaigns are working to win over black voters. like Wilson and Atkins, especially in Georgia, where the 16 electoral votes are critical to most paths to victory.
“I’m not saying he’s racist; I’m not saying he isn’t,” Atkins said of Trump, who has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and said Black voters identify with him because he has been “discriminated against” by the criminal justice system, most recently . citing his historic conviction in New York last month.
Atkins reiterated that position. As a black man with a criminal record, he said, “They’ve been doing that to us for years.” While Wilson finds many of Trump’s overtures toward black voters “offensive,” Atkins sees the Republican as the lesser of “two evils” so far.
Before 2020, a Democratic presidential candidate had not won Georgia since Southerner Bill Clinton won the country in 1992. Biden’s win there four years ago, followed by Sens. wins. Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, was seen as evidence of the shifting political tides around the world. South. To Trump and the Republican Party, losing Georgia after winning it by 5 percentage points in 2016 is painful, and his efforts to change the outcome there are at the center of a lawsuit in Atlanta’s Fulton County that will continue extend beyond the 2024 vote.
Polls have shown that many of the Georgians who helped put Biden in power are disappointed with what they see as promises he and his party have failed to keep, including on voting rights and child care affordability. But the outcome in the state will depend on factors that polls struggle to measure, such as consumer confidence, voter reach in Hispanic communities and whether the state’s strict six-week abortion ban is upheld in court. “Social issues are business issues,” says Molly Dickinson, founder of Banner Day, a branding agency that works closely with “traditionally underserved” entrepreneurs.
Dickinson, 38, is supporting Democrats this year partly out of concern about reproductive rights.
“As an owner, if I have an unwanted pregnancy, it will drastically change how I can operate my business,” she said of Georgia’s abortion restrictions. “Small business owners make business decisions based on how comfortable they feel at home and in their daily lives.” Healthcare in general is a major issue in her circle. “When you run a small business, a lot of times it doesn’t run without you,” she said. “One disease is enough to sideline a business when you’re small.”
Dickinson added that many of her clients can’t afford more than “a bare minimum plan” for employee health insurance and that some potential founders “won’t even start their business for that reason.”
For Rich Chey, the bigger barrier to business is simply the crushing of competitors in a city center of 510,000, whose population increased by 12,000 between July 2022 and the same month last year, according to a census analysis released last month. “There are a lot of operators out there,” said Chey, 59, who owns a pair of restaurants, Doc Chey’s Noodle House and Osteria 832.
He cited a boom in multifamily housing that has brought a flood of new storefronts to the city. Many of the commercial tenants in those new spaces may never be profitable, Chey said, but “even if a restaurant opens a mile away, and even if they take five or 10 customers out of my business … a thousand cuts.” “Business has been good,” Chey said, but food and labor costs have taken their toll. “We’re just not able to raise menu prices at the same rate as inputs are going up,” he said, estimating that his profit margins have shrunk by 50 percent in recent years.
Chey, a registered independent, declined to say how he will vote this fall. But he is intrigued by Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and frustrated by what he sees as legal requirements that “make it harder for us to run a business.” At the same time, Chey is skeptical about “protective barriers” that need to be kept in place. domestic companies, which both candidates support in different ways, but Trump wants to expand dramatically.
“I’m probably more capitalist than anti-capitalist,” he said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
