Barrow says hello to many of the employees on their 11:30 a.m. lunch break, greeting them with a fist-bump and flashing a toothy smile.

In one of the small break rooms, he sits down to eat a Subway Italian foot-long he's brought along for his tour. Most of the employees have brought food from home: sandwiches, chicken and rice.

Barrow talks a language lawmaker and worker have in common: football.

The Coffee County high school team just beat Tifton 24-7. They play Lowndes County later in the month. Barrow asks if the Valdosta school is still a formidable foe.

"Nah," the employees respond in unison.

"They ain't no good no more," adds one.

With others, he talks land.

His grandma was born in Baxley. Lived here in the 1880s when white folks in Dixie were fiercely proud to be Democrats.

He grew up in Athens, the son of Judge James Barrow and Phyllis Jenkins Barrow, who both served in the military during World War II.

When he was "itty-bitty," Barrow says, he drove through Appling County on his way to Jekyll Island for family vacations on the Georgia coast. That was at the height of the struggle to end segregation.

He studied political science and history at the University of Georgia -- his blood runs Bulldog Red and Black -- before studying law at Harvard.

By then, the South had already turned the corner in going from blue to red.

After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he reportedly told an aide: "We have lost the South for a generation."

Johnson was right. Conservative white Southerners turned Republican in droves as the national Democratic Party championed equal rights and was seen as increasingly liberal.

That perception remains an obstacle for Barrow to this day.

"The Democratic Party is now defined by Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. These are very liberal Democrats," says Emory's Black.

"And that's a nonstarter for a majority of whites in the South."

As Barrow makes his way past machines that melt and mold aluminum, Mark Sibley comes running out of a glass office. He wants to shake Barrow's hand.

"I vote for anybody who's good. I don't care about party," Sibley says.

He tells Barrow he likes his commercials and his promises to end wasteful spending.

Mark Sibley ran out to shake Barrow's hand during a tour of Elixir Industries.

Sibley has worked at Elixir for 2 1/2 years. That was after he lost a job at a chicken plant that shuttered its Coffee County operations in 2009.

Sibley says it means a lot to him that Barrow came to visit Elixir and took the time to meet with voters.

He and others here say they aren't much impressed with Barrow's opponent.

Lee Anderson, a state legislator and former head of the Georgia Farm Bureau, stamps his campaign placards with an image of a tractor. He has a Southern accent so pronounced, says Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jim Galloway, that it ought to be bottled up for posterity.