The 61st mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, says the case to be made for giving Kamala Harris a vote in the 2024 presidential election includes Republicans who appeared at the DNC.
GOP lawmakers, including former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, went on the DNC stage to lay out reasons why even they believe former President Donald Trump shouldn't be elected for a second term in office.
"Our party is not civil or conservative, it's chaotic and crazy and the only thing left to do is to dump Trump," said Duncan in Chicago on Wednesday night.
Mayor Dickens told Scripps News, "I know Jeff Duncan personally, when he was lieutenant governor, but also he and I went to Georgia Tech together ... I know him to be a good man. And I know him to be someone focused on technology, on our families, on our communities, on making sure that Georgia is good for business. And, he's a common-sense person," he said.
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The Trump campaign platform has largely focused on a plan to bring down violence and other crimes in the U.S. Mayor Dickens pushed back on that, signaling the campaign for Kamala Harris and the Democrats have a better chance at reducing crime.
U.S. employment's effect on crime
"We are about public safety as well as criminal justice reform. That is something that Trump, Vance, none of those MAGA Republicans ever care about, is criminal justice reform. When you look at how Biden-Harris were able to add all these millions of jobs across America, that is a way to bring down violent crime, and that is what we did in the city of Atlanta," Dickens said.
In April, the University of Chicago released a reportanalyzing the correlation between crime and the job market — it found that 80% of all crimes are "property offenses," and the study;s authors said that employment and that type of crime are directly related.
The report states, "The best available evidence suggests that policies that reduce economic desperation reduce property crime, (and hence overall crime rates) but have little systematic relationship to violent crime."
Job growth in the U.S.
This week the Department of Labor released revised data showing the U.S. job market had slowed at a faster pace than it was initially estimated.
Revised data shows that the U.S. economy added 819,000 fewer jobs than estimated in the 12-month period ending in March, based on counts derived from state unemployment insurance tax records.
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Trump's relationship with some prominent Georgia Republicans
Atlanta's Mayor Dickens, speaking about former President Trump's 2020 election interactions with GOP lawmakers in Georgia, said the former president's relationship with state leaders like Republican Gov. Brian Kemp would continue to be rocky.
"We've already heard the negative rhetoric that he has towards Georgia, towards Atlanta, [Trump] doesn't even like the Republican governor of the state of Georgia. He disses Brian Kemp every chance he gets because Brian Kemp wouldn't go along with his scheme to find 11,000 votes that was rightfully cast for Biden," Duncan said. "And so he's on a warpath of revenge, retribution against Atlanta, against Georgia — and I don't think that would stop if he were to become president."
On Thursday during a campaign event appearing a location on the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico, Donald Trump told reporters while holding up a chart, "this was the last weekend in office for me," speaking about the end of his term in office. "Because of a horrible horrible election, where I got many millions more votes than I got the first time. But, didn't quite make it, just a little bit short."
