The Republican governor of Georgia stepped up his attack on Major League Baseball on Saturday, over its decision to pull its All-Star Game from the state in response to a new voting law.
“It’s minority-owned businesses that have been hit harder than most because of an invisible virus, by no fault of their own,” Brian Kemp said. “And these are the same minority businesses that are now being impacted by another decision that is by no fault of their own.”
The Fox News host Sean Hannity thundered this week that MLB “has now cost the people of Georgia almost $100m in revenue”.
“Every person in Georgia should be furious,” he added.
But experts dispute that losing the All-Star game will have so heavy an impact.
Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian this week: “There is some loss, so it’s not zero, but it’s a whole lot closer to zero than the $100m number Atlanta was throwing around.”
On Saturday Kemp spoke alongside the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, also a Republican, at a seafood restaurant miles from the stadium in the Atlanta suburbs where the game would have been held. He said he didn’t think the business was minority-owned.
The game will now be played in Denver. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, has claimed the city will receive an economic boost of $190m.
Matheson said: “There’s no real reason that you should believe economic impact numbers that are commissioned by people who are made to look good by big economic impact numbers.”
Kemp noted that Denver has a much smaller percentage of African Americans than Atlanta.
Critics say the Georgia voting law will disproportionately affect communities of color. Aklima Khondoker, state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said Kemp’s news conference was an attempt to deflect from that as he gears up to try to win a second term.
“He’s pivoting away from all of the malicious things that we understand that this bill represents to people of color in Georgia,” she said.
Elsewhere in the state, about two dozen protesters turned out near Augusta National as the Masters golf championship continued, holding signs that said “Let Us Vote” and “Protect Georgia Voting Rights”.
The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said he made the decision to move the All-Star game after discussions with players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, and that the league opposed restrictions to the ballot box.
On Saturday an MLB spokesman said the league had no immediate additional comment.
Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Georgia voting measure, which includes strict identification requirements for voting by mail. It expands weekend early voting but limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line and gives the state election board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to replace local officials.
That has led to concerns the Republican-controlled board could exert more influence over elections, including the certification of county results.
The rewrite of Georgia’s election rules – signed by Kemp last month – follows Donald Trump’s repeated lies about electoral fraud after his loss to Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate won Georgia, before two Democrats won Senate runoffs there in January, tipping control of the chamber.
Democrats have assailed the Georgia law as an attempt to suppress Black and Latino votes, with Biden calling it “Jim Crow in the 21st century”. Carr and Kemp blasted that comparison.
“This made-up narrative that this bill takes us back to Jim Crow – an era when human beings were being killed and who were truly prevented from casting their vote – is preposterous,” Carr said. “It is irresponsible, and it’s fundamentally wrong.”
