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To understand this race, you have to know the space Walker occupies in the hearts of potential voters. “This guy’s a god in Georgia,” Shelley Wynter, a radio host on Atlanta’s conservative talk station WSB, told me. “I don’t think people who don’t live in Georgia understand that.”

Walker was born in Wrightsville, Ga., a crossroads connecting several rural counties, where Confederate and Trump flags still wave. It’s a community of 3,600 named after an enslaver; a remote place where once clothing factories and kaolin mines provided jobs, but now a quarter of the storefronts among its four-block business node are shuttered. It’s also a town where the 110 students in Walker’s 1980 senior class at Johnson County High School were evenly split between Black and White, but racial tensions thrust Walker in the middle.