Meet the Democratic Socialist Winning in a Lockheed Town

When strategists for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a leftist organization whose political platform includes cutting the Pentagon budget to fund climate needs, scouted around for local races in Georgia where they thought a candidate they backed may have a chance at winning, they settled on a curious one. It was House District 42, a swath of suburbs north of Atlanta that includes portions of Marietta, Smyrna, unincorporated Cobb County, and an 850-acre aircraft plant for America’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin.

In May, the candidate the DSA backed, a 27-year-old waiter named Gabriel Sanchez, won the Democratic primary in a local landslide. He ousted a four-term incumbent who took campaign funds from the Arlington-based Lockheed Martin Employees’ Political Action Committee, voted in favor of a 2021 bill that earmarked $100 million in tax breaks to the defense contractor, and lobbied the federal government to grant a lucrative contract to the company. Sanchez beat that incumbent, Teri Anulewicz, 57% to 43%. He’ll face a Republican opponent in November, but his May win in the deeply blue district all but guarantees he’ll end up in the Legislature. 

Sanchez spoke with Inkstick about campaigning as a progressive in company town territory and what voters told him and his volunteers — who knocked on 17,000 doors and chatted with thousands of voters — that they cared about.

“Surprisingly, it [Lockheed] didn’t really come up for people in conversations,” Sanchez said. He met employees who worked at the plant and said he didn’t get “any pushback about my candidacy” on the issue. Sanchez said the number-one concern he heard in his district was housing costs in suburbs where homeownership was once affordable but is now increasingly out of reach for working families.

Locals did speak often about Israel’s war on Gaza, telling him they were abstaining from voting because they were “disgusted” with the current administration’s actions, he said. Even though he was running as a Democrat, Sanchez said he and his volunteers “managed to convince some of them to vote for our campaign because we [the DSA] do support a ceasefire.”

$100 Million Tax Break “Megadeal” 

While the defense budget is a federal matter, state and local officials also have a say in the contractors’ bottom line and in influencing labor policies.

Chief among the ways that Anulewicz, the incumbent Sanchez beat out, did so was by voting in favor of 2021 legislation championed by Bert Reeves, a Republican state legislator representing Marietta, that earmarked $100 million in state tax breaks for the company. Senate Bill 6 did not name Lockheed Martin, but instead wrote of the special tax breaks for “a high-impact aerospace defense project” that is “constructed by a business enterprise that is a prime aerospace defense contractor with greater than 40% of its revenues derived from sales to the United States government.” The language pointed directly to Lockheed Martin, Georgia’s largest defense contractor, and its Marietta operations, which is Lockheed’s second-largest aircraft plant. Good Jobs First, a national watchdog that scrutinizes state and local corporate tax breaks, classified the Lockheed earmark as a “megadeal” in its Subsidy Tracker.

Georgia’s Republican governor touted the bill as potentially creating 3,000 new jobs manufacturing new types of aircraft at Lockheed. But a closer look at the bill’s text raises questions about those claims: The bill lays out staggered employment benchmarks of 1,000 and 1,800 but makes no mention of those positions being new or the company needing to maintain a baseline number of jobs on ongoing aircraft programs such as the C-130 or the F-35.

The Marietta Daily Journal recently reported that the company already employs 5,600 people at the plant. The Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) did not answer questions from Inkstick about whether Lockheed could lower its headcount in Marietta and nonetheless receive the tax credits spelled out in SB6. DOR spokesman Austin Gibbons wrote in an email that “a taxpayer’s eligibility to claim a credit is confidential taxpayer information that we cannot disclose.” An attorney for the DOR also told Inkstick it would not provide Lockheed’s performance reports — which track whether the company has met employment and investment benchmarks to claim tax breaks — because those are also considered confidential. 

SB6 also allows for counting “leased employees” toward the company’s job figures. The beleaguered local Machinists union, which represents about 2,000 workers at the plant, says that subcontracting positions like grounds keeping, janitorial, and warehousing have been a key way the company stealthily busts its union, as Inkstick reported last year. The legislation also only requires that Lockheed pay its employees “at or above the average wage of the county with the lowest average wage in the state,” which, according to data from the state’s labor department, would be about $19 an hour.

Wakefield also said that SB6, which also included provisions for lawmakers to request up to five audits of companies receiving tax breaks per year, was a move in the right direction for Georgia, which Pew had beforehand ranked as “trailing” other states in evaluation. But Wakefield said a stronger measure would be for lawmakers to include a schedule by which all companies receiving tax breaks are evaluated. In some states, she added, legislators hold public hearings on the performance of tax break recipients.

Sanchez said he plans to “dive into” the tax breaks if he ends up in the statehouse after November’s general election. “We have to stop, to be frank, wasting our tax dollars with people who don’t need it,” he added, “because the people who need it are working-class Georgians.”

Still a Company Town?

When those DSA strategists looked at House District 42, they saw some promising signs for a challenger like Sanchez: the district was majority-minority, had voted by more than 40% for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary in 2016, skewed young, and had a population that was just over half renters. Also, with scant attention and resources dedicated to local elections, they noted that a self-described libertarian socialist had run against Anulewicz in 2020, who barely fundraised and nonetheless got 41% of the vote. 

Anulewicz outraised Sanchez by more than double — $161,000 to his $63,500 — though he outdid her in individual contributions. Sanchez refused corporate and PAC money, while Anulewicz’s top donors included special interest groups like the Lockheed PAC and the Sports Betting Alliance. In the end, he said what seemed to make the difference was his campaign’s ground game. In the field, he and his volunteers often found that voters didn’t know the incumbent’s name. “The amount of voters we talked to almost reached the amount of voters there were the entire [primary] election,” Sanchez said, adding that Anulewicz “relied heavily on endorsements, mailers and just yard signs and events.”

That the district with the largest concentration of Pentagon spending in Georgia will likely be represented by a progressive speaks both to how that arms plant ended up there and the changing political economy in Cobb County, the third-most populous county in Georgia. A pivotal transformation of Cobb’s economy took place in 1941, when, following a lobbying campaign by local boosters eager to industrialize the area and lift it out of the Great Depression, the federal government agreed to build an airstrip in a then-rural locality. 

That was followed by the construction of Government Aircraft Plant 6, which rolled out hundreds of Boeing-designed B-29 Superfortresses during WWII. The busy plant transformed Marietta into one of the largest aircraft manufacturing sites in the world. Lockheed reopened the (slightly renamed) Air Force Plant 6 during the Korean War and the boom in military spending that the Cold War ushered in. In the decades since, the plant has rolled off assembly lines an assortment of military aircraft, including 2,600 C-130s, the cargo plane used to evacuate people from Kabul as the Taliban retook the country in 2021, and 187 F-22s, a fighter jet recently used to shoot down a Chinese balloon off the coast of South Carolina.

Traces of that industrial behemoth are part of the local landscape in Cobb, home to the Lockheed Martin Elementary School and offices for the LGE Credit Union, formerly known as the Lockheed Georgia Employees’ Federal Credit Union. (It’s where Sanchez, who prefers local credit unions to large financial institutions, does his banking.) 

But a job at Lockheed in Marietta isn’t what it used to be, when it had a 30,000-strong union that overflowed the local lodge’s auditorium. Beyond Marietta, the company overall was at least 69% unionized in 1971; today that number is 19%.

And some events on the ground suggest voters who told Sanchez’s volunteers they didn’t want to vote for a Democrat because they opposed President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza aren’t odd men out in their community. Last October, the Cobb County Commission withdrew a resolution declaring “unwavering support” for Israel following local outcry. In 2020, student groups at Kennesaw State University, a public university with a campus adjacent to the Lockheed plant, protested when a Black Lockheed executive, Roderick McLean, was invited to the school’s MLK legacy luncheon, arguing that it tarnished King’s practice of nonviolence.

In addition to the tax cuts, Sanchez told Inkstick about other ways he plans to engage with Lockheed locally. He’s concerned about a residential area called Fair Oaks, a low-income census-designated region that includes trailer homes and that suffers from high noise from the aircraft taking off and landing from the Dobbins Air Reserve Base, which is next to Lockheed. He also plans to tour the unions present in his district, including the Machinists local, and to promote and expand the right to unionize in a state whose lawmakers recently passed a bill to restrict union drives at companies that receive state economic incentives — like Lockheed.  

“A lot of people in the South are so used to being oppressed and exploited that they’re willing to just take anything, because they don’t want to lose the little that they have,” Sanchez said. “And I think that that’s something that I definitely want to work on as a representative — to educate people on: ‘Actually, you can ask for more, you can demand more, and it’s okay to go against your own bosses.’”

Top photo: Gabriel Sanchez speaks at an election event (Courtesy of Gabriel Sanchez’s campaign)