Georgia’s Billion-Dollar Bonfire

Here are some of the ways that $443,210,038.26 could have been spent in the state of Georgia in 2020. Each time someone filed for unemployment—4.2 million claims have been processed since March, more than the past nine years combined—that person could have received a $100 bill. Roughly 100,000 of the state’s 1.4 million residents who are living through a global pandemic without health insurance could have purchased plans through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Every freshman and sophomore at Spelman and Morehouse, two historically Black colleges in Atlanta known for producing political leaders, could have been awarded four-year full rides.

[Read: Can the religious left flip the Bible Belt?]

Instead, donors have plowed almost half a billion dollars into the campaigns of four candidates in Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoff races, in which voters will cast the final ballots today. These