Harris gives Democrats new hope in the ultra-competitive state of Georgia
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.
