During a Wednesday night appearance on ESPN, President Joe Biden said that he would “strongly support” Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta as a protest of Georgia’s new voting law.
“This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they’re doing in Georgia,” Biden said on ESPN.
Several of Biden’s claims about Georgia’s law have been debunked. “Biden falsely claims the new Georgia law ‘ends voting hours early,’ the Washington Post fact-checker reported this week. See also Rich Lowry’s column: “The Voter Suppression Lie.”
Biden’s support for the MLB’s pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia could backfire badly on him and fellow Democrats.
A normal political response would be to support the defeat of politicians who passed the law, but the president is now calling on a big business to punish an entire American state over a law he opposes.
The MLB’s discussion of pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia comes as other big businesses are facing pressure to boycott the state.
Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, clearly gets that a boycott of Georgia would be disastrous politics for Democrats. “Leaving us behind with boycotts won’t save us. I ask you to bring your business to Georgia and, if you’re already here, stay and fight,” Abrams writes in USA Today.