Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won Georgia in the 2020 election and again in 2022, has directly told Kamala Harris he’s “all in” on helping her defeat Donald Trump this fall.
But he warns it will be difficult.
“We built an architecture to win,” Warnock told a small group of reporters in Chicago during the Democratic convention last week. “I think we can put Georgia in the Harris-Walz column. I’m not going to pretend that that will be an easy thing to do. But can we do it? I absolutely believe that we can.”
Georgia will be front and center this week as Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, begin a bus tour together in the state Wednesday, which is scheduled to end in the Savannah area with a solo Harris rally Thursday. The same day, Harris and Walz are set to do a joint TV interview, Harris’ first since she became her party’s nominee.
Joe Biden won Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes over Trump in 2020, becoming the first Democrat to carry the longtime GOP stronghold in nearly three decades. Now it’s up to Harris to prove whether that was a fluke or whether Democrats can keep it in the blue column at the highest level.
Harris is a better demographic fit than Biden for Georgia, which has the highest proportion of Black voters of any presidential battleground. Its electorate is also younger than those of most other presidential battlegrounds, and while Biden was struggling with young voters this cycle, they appear more receptive to Harris so far. The state also has a fast-growing Asian American population, which leans Democratic and has helped the party in close races.
Harris is already enjoying much stronger fundraising than Biden, making the expensive Atlanta media market less daunting. And if she struggles more than Biden in the mostly white Rust Belt, Georgia’s 16 electoral votes — compared with Michigan’s 15 and Wisconsin’s 10 — offer a potential alternative path to 270.
Trump’s team is putting a premium on Georgia, as well, seeing it as a key part of his path back to the White House.
“As long as we hold North Carolina, we just need to win Georgia and Pennsylvania. That’s all we need to win,” a senior Trump adviser said this month.
To win Georgia, Harris will need to reproduce the formula that powered Biden and Warnock: boosting turnout and mobilizing Democrats in deep-blue Atlanta; putting big points on the board in the city’s population-rich suburbs, which are full of well-educated voters who are skeptical of Trump; and limiting her margin of defeat in the vast and solidly red rural areas, where losing by less could hand her the state’s 16 electoral votes.
A Harris campaign official boasted that it has “the largest in-state operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle ever,” including offices in “rural counties like Washington and Jenkins counties.” As part of Harris’ appeal to small-town voters, her campaign touted the Biden-Harris administration’s investments to boost rural health care and internet access.
The campaign, pointing to former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan as a surrogate, also indicated that it’s looking at the 2024 primary results as a guidepost for where Trump lost significant votes to Nikki Haley as areas to grow its support among center-right voters. It plans to highlight Republican infighting, including Trump’s history of attacks against GOP Gov. Brian Kemp for certifying Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.
Before Biden dropped out, his team had all but abandoned Georgia this cycle, opting for a more cautious strategy focused on the so-called Blue Wall states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — as some Democrats wondered whether their 2020 success in Georgia was something of a fluke that couldn’t be easily replicated, especially without Warnock on the ballot.
Warnock’s 2022 campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, is deputy campaign manager for the Harris presidential campaign.
Sammy Baker, the chairman of the Gwinnett County Republican Party, said replacing Biden with Harris has improved Democrats’ fortunes in Georgia.
“I was very, very comfortable that it would be — not an easy win, but it would be a 4- or 5-point win. I think it’s going to be a little tighter now, because I think she’s energized a few of the Democrats that were not energized before, and they seem to be a little more active,” Baker said.
He said the key to a Trump victory is to stay focused on policy, advice that Trump frequently receives and rarely takes.
“I really think the whole thing comes down to this: Trump stays on message, and he wins. Just border, the economy, inflation, housing,” Baker said. “If he stays on those issues, I definitely think that’s a win. And that’s what they need to concentrate on. Stay on that.”
The diverse and populous Gwinnett County, just outside Atlanta, is the embodiment of Georgia’s red-to-blue shift: It voted for Republican Mitt Romney by nearly 10 points in 2012, then swung to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 5 points in 2016 and voted for Biden by 18 points in 2020.
A Trump victory in Georgia would most likely require flipping some of those voters back, lowering Democratic turnout or finding more first-time Trump voters to overpower new Harris voters.
Trump’s team expects to tie Harris to Biden administration policies that aren’t popular in the state and to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who would have been the nation’s first Black female state chief executive.
“I think Georgia is ready to reject her very far-left stances,” said a senior Republican National Committee official who compared Harris’ political views to Abrams’.
The official, discussing strategy on condition of anonymity, accused Democrats of having just discovered parts of the state outside vote-rich Atlanta and predicted that their bus tour won’t be as effective as GOP efforts to target and mobilize low-propensity voters across Georgia.
“Democrats are running around doing their dog and pony show right now with their bus tour, but we’re focused on turning out the vote in Georgia, and we feel voters on the ground have been highly engaged and are energetic throughout the state,” the official said.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor whom Harris traveled to the city to campaign for during her successful 2017 bid, is now a senior adviser to her campaign — and she got a front-row seat at last week’s convention in Chicago.
At the time, while she was campaigning for Bottoms, Harris said “coming to Atlanta is always like coming home” in explaining why she flew all the way from California to support a mayoral candidate. She also noted how many times she visited the city, which she said is at the center of Black history, culture and business.
“There is so much about who we are as a country that was created, that is based, that was fought for here in Atlanta,” she said.
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