Plains, Ga. —
In a cavernous store filled with trinkets and knick-knacks, Philip Kurland is surrounded by politics.
“We’re the largest political memorabilia dealer in the United States,” he tells VOA as he sorts through numerous bins that line his shop.
If there’s a button or badge supporting a political candidate, chances are Kurland has it, as he stops and inspects one button in particular.
“This is the number one button people request and come in for,” as he proudly shows an image of a smiling peanut shell.
Every four years, Kurland stocks up on items featuring the candidates of the moment, and gauges support by the volume of related memorabilia he sells.
“Our sales have always equaled to who has won,” said Kurland. “This year’s election is really hard to even say by my sales.”
His store isn’t just any ordinary shop in the country. It’s the Plains Trading Post … as in Plains, Georgia, the hometown of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter with a population of around 600 people, where the streets are lined with dueling signs from the current election supporting both Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.
“For the first time ever, I’d say there was some tension over the upcoming election,” Kurland told VOA.
In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won Sumter County which encompasses Plains, and narrowly won the state of Georgia by 11,779 votes out of more than 5 million cast.
“It’s shocking that we’re a battleground state now,” said Kurland, acknowledging that polls continue to show a close race in Georgia this election cycle where both campaigns recognize every vote counts, including a prominent one cast by mail-in ballot from the most famous resident of Plains.
“I don’t think he’d miss any opportunity to vote,” said Kurland, “I can remember one time when they passed a new law in the state that you had to show an ID, and he went to vote and didn’t have an ID, and they said, ‘you can’t vote.’
And he said, ‘I’m the president of the United States!’ and they said, ‘well, we’re sorry,’ and he had to go home and get an ID to vote, which I thought was hilarious.”
“He was excited to turn 100, but he’s more excited to cast his ballot for Vice President Harris,” Jason Carter, Jimmy Carter’s grandson, explained to VOA during a recent interview.
Jason Carter currently serves as chairman of the board of the former president’s global nonprofit Carter Center.
“It would be an incredible story, at the end of his 100-year life, that is continuing on as we know, to have grown up in the segregated south and for one of his last political acts is to help elect a Black woman who is a president, I do think it would be important,” he said.
“Jimmy Carter has already said it was important for him to vote for Barack Obama in 2008,” said Joe Crespino, a professor of history at Emory University.
Crespino believes Carter’s vote this year is directly connected to his legacy, specifically his efforts to get the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or ERA — which prohibits sex discrimination — ratified by some U.S. states while he was president in the 1970s.
“Voting for the first female candidate of color would be important for him not only because of his experiences with race over the course of his life but also his experiences in trying to advance women in public life,” he said.
More than 40 years after Carter served in the White House, the ERA is still an unsettled issue as legal debates over its ratification continue.
Jason Carter believes with a vote in the 2024 election, his grandfather is thinking as much about the future as he is the past.
“I think he wants to see this country brought back together,” said Carter. “I think he wants to reduce that polarization; I think he wants us to focus on what makes us Americans first and fundamentally, and I think he thinks she [Harris] can do that.”
Kurland said not everyone in Plains agrees with Jimmy Carter, or his candidate of choice, as he sees not just the tourists but some of the locals stopping in to pick up memorabilia.
“Some days you can’t get eight people to say the sun is shining at the same time,” he said.
But Kurland admits everyone in Plains honors the man who continues to draw tens of thousands of tourists to their small town each year.
“Even though he’s come out for Kamala Harris, everyone that’s not for her would instantly forgive him and still love him,” Kurland said.
As election day nears, Jimmy Carter continues to receive hospice care in his modest home in Plains on the edge of town, not far from the Depression-era boyhood farm where his story began 100 years ago.
