NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

When Donald Trump first announced his run for president, Karl Booker was intrigued.

From where he stood, behind a barber's chair in a gentrifying neighborhood near downtown Atlanta, the thought of a political outsider shaking things up seemed promising. Perhaps, he thought, the Manhattan businessman could make government more responsive to people like his own mostly black clientele.

Then, Booker said, Trump "started pandering to the racist side of it" -- disparaging Mexicans, insulting Latino Americans, portraying African American life as a hellish slough of crime, poverty and other grim pathologies.

Now, comb and scissors in hand, the 49-year-old Booker draws a red line through the bustling Off the Hook barbershop, with its Barack Obama posters, sports memorabilia and pennants celebrating Georgia's historic black colleges.

We in here are going to do everything we can to stop Donald Trump.

-- Karl Booker

"We in here are going to do everything we can to stop Donald Trump," Booker declared in a hard, gravelly voice that brooked no doubt.

Until this summer, a black voter in Atlanta didn't matter much in the race for president. Georgia was as Republican red as its famous clay soil, having backed the GOP nominee in seven of the last eight presidential contests, including the last five in a row.

But as the presidential race reaches the Labor Day weekend -- once the beginning of the general election campaign but now the beginning of the end -- Democrats are considering a serious run at Georgia's 16 electoral votes.

That's a measure of Trump's weakness and of long-term shifts in the politics of states along the southeastern coast from Virginia to Florida that have grown more hospitable to Democrats.

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