SerpApi.Org
COBB COUNTY, Ga. (Atlanta News First) — President Donald Trump will visit Wheeler High School in Cobb County on Wednesday.
While the White House says he will be there mainly to tout his newly launched Trump Accounts – savings plans meant to help families pay for college – Trump will likely also use the stop as a campaign event of sorts ahead of the November midterms.
Trump will be joined at the rally by Rep. Mike Collins, who is the GOP’s nominee to face Sen. Jon Ossoff in the fall, and Rick Jackson, the Republican gubernatorial nominee. Trump will very likely encourage voters to turn out for them in the midterms.
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Many Democratic lawmakers and policy experts weren’t keen on the idea of Trump using a local high school as the setting for his rally, despite its theme on college savings.
“Cobb County is a Democratic-leaning county and Democrats are not excited about him coming,” said Alisha Thomas Searcy, a former Democratic representative in Georgia’s House and CEO of the Center for Strong Public Schools.
Searcy is also a Cobb County resident.
“I’m actually disappointed that our superintendent of schools is participating in this,” she added. “I think this is a way to politicize education and politicize schools, so I’m troubled by that.”
Cobb County – once a Republican stronghold – has changed drastically in the past decade. A slew of new growth and demographic change has morphed Cobb into a majority-Democratic voter base, with the party holding most every major seat of government in the county.
“What’s changed has been most of the growth in Cobb County has been Democrats moving in,” said Jason Shepherd, the former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party. “Even though Cobb County is not a majority-Republican county, we compete with Gwinnett County – which is much larger – for the largest bucket of Republican votes in the state. And those are votes that need to turn out in November for the Republican ticket to win.”
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Shepherd says the growth of Kennesaw State University, which enrolled around 12,000 students when he was chair but now enrolls closer to 50,000, added to the trend.
Shepherd isn’t concerned by Trump’s choice to visit a high school. He points to instances when former President George W. Bush visited Harrison High School in 2003 and when then-candidate Barack Obama visited McEachern High School in 2008.
“The fact that three out of the last four presidents have chosen Cobb County schools shows exactly where Cobb County schools fit in the national spotlight,” he said.
