“This is what Democracy looks like!”
It was a favorite chant of the peaceful protestors that crowded into Downtown Marietta on Saturday. Over 400 people registered for the event, but estimates from members on the ground said we likely doubled that number.
Regardless, the number of attendees was in the hundreds. Hundreds of people felt strongly enough about the state of our democracy and country that they showed up to protest. They joined the 1,200 protests and millions of patriots across the country Saturday to send Washington DC a message:
Hands Off!
“We have not even reached 100 days yet and we have been stripped of everything,” said Cobb County Democratic Committee Chair Essence Johnson. “We have to stand strong, we have to stand united, and we have to stay together.”
Johnson attributed the crowd’s size to the county’s continuous role as an epicenter in Georgia politics. Not only was Cobb County one of the handful of counties in the state to increase voter margins for Democrats in the 2024 election, we have continuously flipped republican seats one-by-one.
Saturday’s protesters cheered for Erick Allen, Cobb County Commissioner candidate for District 2, and Commissioner Monique Sheffield, who is up for reelection. Both candidates have spent the past four months providing voters with their clear vision for the community once elected on April 29.
Along with Johnson and other members of CCDC’s executive board, the President of the Cobb Young Democrats, Zach Neville, made an appearance as did several Democrats fresh out of Georgia’s legislative session. Rep. Solomon Adesanya spoke to the crowd about the latest GOP attempts to make life hard for Georgians. Representatives Mekyah McQueen and Garbiel Sanchez dropped in a little later to socialize with attendees.
After leaving the square, Rep. Sanchez drove to the Georgia State Capitol where he spoke to the crowd gathered at the Atlanta Hands Off! protest. Atlanta’s protest, which was organized with the help of our dear friend Laura Judge, saw 30,000 participants.
A new and powerful movement was on full display on Saturday, but much like the 2020 election, republicans struggled to grasp the reality of the situation.
Saturday’s Hands Off! crowd was too small, too big, paid, jobless, hippies, multinational globalists, and so on. The GOP’s own little propaganda publication came out to Cobb County’s protest just to show us that they don’t care. Funny way of showing it, but thanks for adding to the crowd numbers.
The cope was real all across Cobb’s MAGAdom as Trump’s disastrous trade policy erased a year’s worth of economic growth on Monday and their new chair was exposed as a South Carolina resident with a $2 million mansion by someone within their own party.
Some of the ill will might also be coming from the republican’s inability to turn out a crowd themselves as their party breakfast on Saturday morning produced a couple dozen attendees to hear from the soon to be defeated Alicia Adams and Cobb County’s chief gerrymandering engineers Rep. Jenny Ehrhart and Sen. Ed Setzler.
Nevertheless, the gripes from a handful of people won’t drown out the cheers from the hundreds who gathered in Marietta Square on Saturday.
This article is a product of the Cobb County Democratic Committee Executive Board.