Amid all the controversy about the political question of Buckhead cityhood, it’s easy to overlook the significance of the date voters would be asked to answer it: Nov. 8, 2022.
The debate so far has swirled around hot-button issues of crime and race and the nit-picking details of dueling pro-and-con financial studies. The political forest missed by all those trees: The cityhood effort is led legislatively by non-local Republican officials, has been greeted by Buckhead residents with a wide partisan divide, and would just happen to appear on the 2022 ballot alongside the Congressional midterms and a probably epic Red-vs.-Blue battle for the Governor’s Office.
In this sense, the Buckhead City advocacy is another showy way for GOP state politicians to mess with Blue Atlanta to remind it who’s boss, a political move “that is as old as Atlanta is important,” says J. Benjamin Taylor, a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. But cityhood could be different from such classics as talk of taking over the airport, he says, as it is fraught with political uncertainty that could surprise anyone involved.
