FORT VALLEY, Ga. — The smell of fried fish was lingering on Sunday afternoon, and there was Bill Clinton beneath a tree, wearing a Harris-Walz camouflage cap and edging closer and closer to his modest audience the longer he spoke.
It was a fittingly intimate setting for Peach County, Georgia, a county where elections are decided by mere hundreds of votes. And for Clinton, who rose to power as “the man from Hope,” drawing on his Arkansas roots, it was a chance to engage in a little homespun politicking before early voting begins Tuesday in Georgia, a key battleground state.
“It’s going to come down to whether you are willing to do one more time what you did when you elected not only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four years ago, but Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,” Clinton said, referring to the two Democrats Georgia elected to the Senate. “And if you are, we will win. And if you are not, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”
From a church service in Albany, where the former president reminisced about campaigning alongside the baseball great Hank Aaron, to the fish fry in Fort Valley attended by a few hundred people, Clinton used the opening hours of a two-day blitz to try to help Harris bump up her score wherever she can.
The fish fry, in a predominantly rural area about two hours south of Atlanta, suggested few places were too small to seek votes — even for a former president.
Clinton’s tour reflected a Democratic effort to inspire voters well beyond Atlanta and its potentially pivotal suburbs. It’s a strategy the Harris campaign is using in several swing states, where they are chasing votes not just in their traditional strongholds but also trying to drive up their margins in other areas.
Former President Donald Trump will try to strike back with no fewer than three speeches in Georgia this week and next.
Clinton’s stop in Fort Valley reinforced how tight the tallies could be in some areas. In 2020, Trump won 52% of the vote in Peach County even as he lost the state. When he carried the county in 2016, he beat Hillary Clinton by 313 votes.
Bill Clinton sought to draw a direct line from the fields of Georgia to the West Wing. (In a nod to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Nebraska-born Democratic nominee for vice president, Clinton riffed about how “it will not hurt to have somebody in the vice president’s office that follows the price of corn and wheat and soybeans.”)
Clinton made sporadically wonkish detours, including a bit about the profit margins of major grocers. But from the first moments at the fish fry, where he congratulated the local college on its victory in Saturday’s homecoming game, Clinton largely pursued a strategy of familiarity, leaning on his own record in the state, naming decades-long allies and talking of long-ago campaigning.
Clinton is scheduled to campaign again in Georgia on Monday — again steering clear of Atlanta — and to headline a bus tour in rural North Carolina later in the week. But on Sunday, Clinton argued that Georgia could all but lock up a victory for Harris.
“They’ve got one heck of a hill to climb if we do win Georgia,” Clinton said of Republicans like Trump.
“It won’t hurt Trump to climb a few more hills,” Clinton said to roars of laughter. “I’ll even pray for him, but not to get to the top before we do.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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