It's been a good year for Ryan Wilson.
Since taking back control of the members-only networking space in December, he said Gathering Spot's revenue has reached $20 million and is growing. The Atlanta-based company is now aiming to open a fourth location in Houston by next year.
But like many small business owners in Georgia's capital city, where Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off Thursday in the first 2024 presidential debate, Wilson said his priorities as a voter outweigh profits.
He praised the Biden administration's efforts to provide federal student loan relief and expand access to capital to entrepreneurs, for example. “These are the kinds of things that will be transformative for the business community as a whole,” said Wilson, who is hosting a debate viewing party at the Gathering Spot on Thursday night.
Trump currently leads Biden in Georgia 43% to 38%, a margin of error just over 3.1 percentage points, according to the latest Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of likely voters. The battleground state's strong but uneven economic recovery is creating a Rorschach test for residents heading to the polls this fall and an opportunity for both sides to get their messages across.
Georgia is in the midst of a startup boom. Company formation peaked at 320,000 new applications in 2021 at the height of the pandemic and has remained at near-record levels since. With generous tax incentives for the entertainment industry and a corporate ecosystem anchored by Atlanta staples Coca-Cola and Home Depot, the state's business climate has been ranked No. 1 in the country by Area Development magazine every year for the past decade.
Wilson, 34, plans to vote for Biden but thinks the president should do more to promote pro-entrepreneur provisions in policies such as the Stop Inflation Act. “The bill passed. That's a big deal,” she said.
Still, he worries that “we're not having this conversation based on facts that should be available to the public,” citing misinformation that the White House has so far refrained from confronting head-on.
Not everyone agrees.
Trump may have been divisive and divided the city, but Joe Biden has divided the world.
“I don't like what Biden's doing,” said Deonte Atkins, 37, owner of The Akai Cafe, which opened six months ago in midtown Atlanta. “Trump may be divisive and he may have divided the city, but Joe Biden has divided the world.”
Atkins is also doing well: Sales have nearly doubled to “six figures,” he said, and he's already building a pizza place and speakeasy-style events space adjacent to his acai bowl joint.
But Atkins attributes his success more to Atlanta's entrepreneurial spirit than to federal policy. In any case, he's more interested in geopolitical issues. He and his fiancée had a baby in March, but he worries about U.S. involvement in Ukraine and Israel.
Ali Skinn of NBC News
“At the end of the day it's about who's going to help you achieve your goals,” he said, adding, “As an entrepreneur, I don't want to go through war for myself or my children.”
Both campaigns are working to win the support of black voters like Wilson and Atkins, especially in Georgia, where the state's 16 electoral votes are crucial in most paths to victory.
“I'm not saying he's a racist, I'm not saying he's not,” Atkins said of Trump, who has accused immigrants of “staining the blood of our country” and said black voters sympathize with him because they have been “discriminated against” by the criminal justice system, most recently citing his historic conviction in New York last month.
Atkins agrees. As a black man with a felony record, he said, “They've been doing this to us for years.” While Wilson finds much of Trump's approach to black voters “insulting,” Atkins currently sees the Republican as the lesser of “two evils.”
Before 2020, a Democratic presidential candidate had not won Georgia since Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992. Biden's victory four years ago, and the subsequent victories of Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, were seen as evidence that the political tides were shifting across the South.
The loss is a blow to Trump and Republicans in Georgia, a state they won by 5 percentage points in 2016, and Trump's efforts to change the state's results are at the center of a lawsuit in Atlanta's Fulton County that is expected to continue beyond the 2024 vote.
Social problems are business problems.
Polls show that many Georgians who helped elect Biden are disappointed with promises he and his party have broken, such as voting rights and affordable child care. But the outcome in the state will depend on factors that are hard to measure in polls, including consumer sentiment, outreach to Spanish-speaking voters and whether the state's strict six-week abortion ban is upheld in court.
“Social issues are business issues,” says Molly Dickinson, founder of Banner Day, a branding firm that works closely with “traditionally underserved” entrepreneurs.
Dickinson, 38, is supporting the Democrats this year, in part due to concerns about reproductive rights.
“If you, as an owner, had an unwanted pregnancy, it would drastically change how you operate your business,” she said of Georgia's abortion restrictions. “Small business owners make business decisions based on how comfortable they feel in their home life and in their daily lives.”
Healthcare in general is a big issue in her environment. “When you're running a small business, a lot of times it doesn't exist without you,” she said. “When you're a small business, it only takes one person to get sick and the business goes under.”
Dickinson added that many of his clients can't afford more than a “bare-bones plan” for employee health insurance, and some aspiring entrepreneurs “don't start a business for that reason.”
You can't increase menu prices at the same rate as your inputs increase.
For Rich Choi, a bigger drag on his business is the proliferation of competitors in the city center of 510,000 people, whose population grew by 12,000 between July 2022 and the same month last year, according to a census analysis released last month.
“There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there,” said Mr. Chay, 59, who owns two restaurants, Doc Chay's Noodle House and Osteria 832.
He cited the apartment building boom that has led to a flurry of new storefronts opening across the city. Choi said that while many of those new commercial tenants may not be profitable, “if a restaurant opens a half-mile away and takes five or 10 customers away from my store…all of a sudden you're dead, killed by a thousand cuts.”
“Business is good,” Mr. Choi said, but food and labor costs are taking a hit. “We can't raise our menu prices as fast as the cost of ingredients is rising,” he said, estimating that profit margins have fallen 50% over the past few years.
Chay, an independent, didn't say how he plans to vote this fall, but he is intrigued by Trump's proposal to eliminate the tip tax and is frustrated by regulatory requirements that “make it harder to do business.”
At the same time, Chey is skeptical of a “protective wall” to shore up domestic businesses, something both candidates support in different ways but which Trump wants to significantly strengthen.
“I'm probably more capitalist than anti-capitalist,” he said.
