Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who won Georgia in 2020 and again in 2022, directly told Kamala Harris that he has “everything” in helping her defeat Donald Trump this fall.
But he warns that it will be difficult.
“We’ve built an architecture to win,” Warnock told a small group of reporters in Chicago last week at the Democratic convention. “I think we can place Georgia in the Harris-Walz column. I’m not going to pretend it’s going to be easy. But can we do it? I fully believe that we will succeed.”
Like Harris and his running mate, Tim Walz, Georgia will be front and center this week. start a bus tour together Wednesday is scheduled to end with a solo Harris rally in the Savannah area on Thursday. That day, Harris and Waltz are set to do a joint television interview, Harris’ first since becoming the party’s nominee.
Joe Biden won Georgia by less 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 if that’s a fluke or if Democrats can keep it at the top in the blue column.
Harris is a better demographic match than Biden for Georgia, which has the highest percentage of black voters in the presidential race. He also has an electorate younger than them in most of the other presidential battlegrounds, and while Biden has struggled with younger voters this cycle, they seem more receptive to Harris so far. The state also has rapidly growing Asian American populationLeaning on the Democrats and helping the party in close races.
Harris already enjoys stronger fundraising than Biden, making the expensive Atlanta media market less daunting. And if he has more of a fight than Biden in the mostly white Rust Belt, Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, compared to Michigan’s 15 and Wisconsin’s 10, offer a potential alternative path to 270.
Trump’s team also values Georgia and sees it as a key part of his path back to the White House.
“As long as we’ve got North Carolina, we just have to win Georgia and Pennsylvania. That’s all we need to win,” Trump’s top adviser said this month.
To win Georgia, Harris will have to repeat the formula that powered Biden and Warnock: increase voter turnout and mobilize Democrats in blue Atlanta; Putting big dots on the board in the city’s populous suburbs, full of educated voters skeptical of Trump; and losing less limited his margin of defeat in the state’s vast and solidly red rural areas, where he could have given him 16 electoral votes.
A Harris campaign official boasted the “largest in-state operation of the Democratic presidential campaign era,” including offices in “rural counties like Washington and Jenkins counties.” As part of Harris’ appeal to small-town voters, his campaign touted the Biden-Harris administration’s investments to increase rural health care and Internet access.
The campaign, which features former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan as its surrogate, also said it is looking at the 2024 primary results as a guide to whether Trump has lost significant votes to Nikki Haley to shore up support among center-right voters. . He plans to highlight ongoing infighting among Republicans, including Trump’s history of attacks on GOP Gov. Brian Kemp, as he confirms Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.
Before Biden dropped out, his team abandoned Georgia altogether in favor of a more cautious strategy focused on so-called Blue Wall states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — as some Democrats wondered if their success in Georgia in 2020 would amount to anything. A coincidence that could not easily be repeated, especially without Warnock on the ballot.
Warnock 2022 campaign manager, Quentin Fulks, He is the deputy campaign manager for Harris’ presidential campaign.
Sammy Baker, chairman of the Gwinnett County Republican Party, said Biden’s replacement with Harris improved the fortunes of Democrats in Georgia.
“I was very, very comfortable that it wouldn’t be an easy win, it would be a 4 or 5 point win. “I think it’s going to be a little bit tougher now because I think he’s energized a few Democrats that weren’t energized before and they seem a little bit more active,” Baker said.
The key to Trump’s victory, he said, is to stay focused on politics, the advice Trump receives often and rarely takes.
“I really think that’s what it’s all about: Trump stays on message and he wins. Just the border, the economy, inflation, housing,” Baker said. “If he stays on those issues, I definitely think it’s a win. And that’s what they need to focus on. Stay on top of it.”
Diverse and densely populated Gwinnett County, just outside Atlanta, epitomizes Georgia’s shift from red to blue: In 2012, it voted for Republican Mitt Romney by about 10 points, then in 2016 it voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton by 5 points. Biden 18 points in 2020.
A Trump victory in Georgia would likely require some of those voters to turn away, reduce Democratic turnout, or find more first-time Trump voters to win over new Harris voters.
Trump’s team expects to tie Harris to unpopular Biden administration policies in the state and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who would become the nation’s first black female governor.
“I think Georgia is ready to reject his very left-wing positions,” said a senior Republican National Committee official who compared Harris’ political views to Abrams’s.
The official, who discussed the strategy on condition of anonymity, accused Democrats of scouting parts of the state outside vote-rich Atlanta and predicted their bus tour would not be as effective as GOP efforts to target and mobilize low-propensity voters inside Georgia. .
“Democrats are running around with a bus tour and a dog and pony show right now, but we’ve been looking at the results in Georgia and we feel like voters on the ground have been highly engaged and energized across the state.” the official said.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor whom Harris traveled to town to campaign for during her successful 2017 bid, is now a top adviser to her campaign — and she front row seat at a convention in Chicago last week.
At that time, when he was Campaign for Bottoms“Coming to Atlanta is always like coming home,” Harris said as he explained why he flew all the way from California to support a mayoral candidate. He also noted how many times he has visited the city, which he says is at the center of Black history, culture and business.
“A lot of who we are as a country was created, founded, fought for in Atlanta,” he said.