Michael Thurmond, Democrats’ ‘sleeper’ candidate, is right where he wants to be

He went on to law school and eventually a career in politics that took him from the Georgia state House, to running the Division of Family and Children Services, to three terms as labor commissioner, to stints turning around the struggling DeKalb County School District and eventually DeKalb County itself.

I caught up with Thurmond this week on a day he split between Atlanta, Athens and Doraville. We met at the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia, where he’d come for a tour after attending a 7 a.m. prayer breakfast and separate fundraiser.

“Feeding the hungry is the cornerstone of our faith,” he told the food bank leaders. “And a state without a heart is no state at all.”

I wanted to see Thurmond campaigning this week because his name often comes up in conversation as the “sleeper candidate” in the crowded Democratic field — the least flashy, but most talented retail campaigner in the bunch. He’s also the one with the most experience, but with less apparent baggage than some others.

With 35% of Democratic voters undecided about who they’ll pick in the Democratic primary, Thurmond could be the one to watch.

Since he launched his campaign for Georgia governor 10 months ago, Thurmond has consistently run in second place in the polls. That’s a crucial position to get into a runoff if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote on Election Day.

A spot in the Democratic runoff would almost certainly pit Thurmond against former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, whose sky-high name ID has helped her dominate the Democratic race for governor so far. Earlier this week, she was endorsed by former President Joe Biden.

But Thurmond said a runoff between him and Bottoms would come down to a choice for voters between “promises versus performance.”

“The best way to know what a politician will do is to look at what he or she has already done,” he said. “When I promise I’m going to bring jobs to rural Georgia, I’ve done it. When I promise that I will serve all of Georgia, I don’t need a GPS to know how to get to Cartersville or Dalton or Rome.”

Speaking of Cartersville and Rome, they are a part of Thurmond’s outside-the-perimeter strategy to get away from metro Atlanta — where he is best known — and in front of as many Democratic voters in Republican counties as possible, the ones that have long been ignored by Democrats over the years but are crucial to win a statewide race.

“You can get to 45% inside I-285, but you can’t get to 50% plus one,” he said. “I continue to say the margin of victory is out there, beyond I-285.”

He calls the far-flung places outside of Atlanta “my natural political habitat.” But it’s been so long since some Democratic groups have seen a statewide Democratic candidate, Thurmond said they often spontaneously applaud him just for showing up.

“It was disconcerting at first,” he said. “But these people have been carrying the torch, keeping the flame alive through basically three decades of Republican dominance.”

Months of visits around the state have also shown him his biggest obstacle to winning isn’t any individual candidate, but voters’ apathy and distrust of the entire political process.

“People have lost faith in institutions; they’ve lost faith in us,” he said. “They think we lie, that we say things like we’re going to address inflation — I’m looking at you, President Trump — then when you get in office, you never think about it again.”

Thurmond recently rolled out his own proposal to address the spiraling cost of living in Georgia by cutting the state sales tax, which he said would help middle- and low-income Georgians the most.

“If we can reduce the state income tax, we can reduce the state sales tax,” he said. “If you can cut the property tax, then you should be able to reduce the sales tax the same way.”

His sales tax idea originated in a piece of legislation he negotiated in the state House back in the day. Nearly all of his other proposals are rooted in the things he saw or did during decades running state agencies and departments or county governments over the years.

Republicans in the state have already made clear they’d welcome Bottoms as their competition in the race for governor in November. They were so eager to make her tumultuous time as Atlanta mayor into attack ads that they’ve already cut commercials attacking her and started running them on Atlanta television.

But Thurmond is a different story. A senior Republican told me recently he sees Thurmond as the sleeper candidate on the Democratic side, who would also be the hardest to beat in a general election. “Michael Thurmond is the one to beat.”