Harris and Trump scrap for Georgia as supporters brace for a photo finish

ATLANTA — Fewer than 12,000 votes in Georgia were the difference between Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the state and Donald Trump’s defeat. Apart from Arizona, there was no thinner margin in the nation.

Four years later, Democrats and Republicans alike are bracing for another squeaker.

“It feels tighter now to me,” said Nathan Deal, a Republican who served two terms as the governor of Georgia.

“It’s going to be close,” Sabrena Brown, a 55-year-old travel agent, said last weekend at a rally in Atlanta where Vice President Kamala Harris starred.

“Just about a point or two,” Brandy Fears, a 37-year-old Trump voter, said outside a town-hall meeting the former president headlined in Zebulon, Georgia, on Wednesday. “I don’t know what the American people are going to do.”

The final days of the presidential campaign in Georgia — a state vital to Trump’s path back to the White House and where Harris is looking to build on Democrats’ recent gains — have been marked by a flurry of activity underlining both parties’ recognition that, once again, the state is anyone’s to win.

With 16 electoral votes, three fewer than Pennsylvania, it’s not the biggest prize. But the razor-thin margins, tantalizing demographics and a feast-or-famine record for both parties have led to a late onslaught that has startled even people who were expecting a frantic finish.

Whether this year’s final tally is skinnier than that of 2020 remains a riddle wrapped up in polling, turnout operations, history and even voters’ whims.

“Just by luck of the draw, we have helped determine not only the course of the country but the future of the U.S. Senate,” said Rick Dent, a veteran political strategist and former aide to Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, a career Democrat who nevertheless endorsed President George W. Bush in 2004. “The amount of money and effort that has been placed on Georgia in the last eight years, it’s just been incomprehensible.”

Since Oct. 19, Harris has spent parts of three days in metro Atlanta, including Thursday, when she held a rally that drew 23,000 people to see a lineup that included former President Barack Obama, Bruce Springsteen and entertainment impresario Tyler Perry. A day earlier, Trump returned to the state for the second time in eight days and held events in rural Georgia and suburban Atlanta. He is scheduled to stop in metro Atlanta again Monday.

Before Trump’s and Harris’ most recent visits, a pair of polls showed the Georgia scramble as a 4-percentage-point race — with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s survey giving Trump the edge and one from The Washington Post showing Harris in the lead. The New York Times’ polling average places Trump a point ahead of the vice president — well within the margin of error.

Both candidates have poured millions into advertising and organizing in the state. Harris’ campaign and its allies have spent nearly $125 million on the airwaves while the operation backing Trump has shelled out more than $96 million, according to the advertisement data tracking firm AdImpact. On the ground, Democrats have been quick to highlight the more than 40,000 volunteers statewide who have joined their camp as Republicans rely on a network of campaign volunteers, well-funded conservative groups and key, if sometimes hesitant, allies in state leadership.

The closing rush comes as more than 2 million Georgians have already voted — an enormous number in a state where fewer than 5 million people cast presidential ballots in 2020, when Biden became the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since 1992.

It is unclear which party stands to benefit most from the deluge. While Democrats have encouraged their voters to use any method to cast ballots, Republicans have embraced early and mail-in voting in a significant reversal from last cycle. As Trump spoke in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta, on Wednesday, electronic signage ringed the arena with a succinct plea: “GO VOTE NOW.”

With exceptionally close races across the seven battlegrounds, Harris campaign officials view Georgia as a potential offset to any losses in the so-called blue-wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a possible Southern stunting of Trump’s paths to victory. A win in Georgia, or in similarly tight North Carolina, would amount to a reassertion of Democratic power in the South, a region the party formerly dominated before it became elusive in recent decades. It has only lately become more competitive thanks in part to growing numbers of young voters and people of color.

Deal, who was elected to Congress as a Democrat at the same time Bill Clinton won Georgia on his way to the White House, said the jockeying of that era for the state’s electoral votes was “nowhere near the intensity that we see now.”

Part of that, of course, can be attributed to changes in technology, communication and the science of presidential politics. Stacey Abrams’ first campaign for governor, in 2018, brought national attention to her strategy of turning out Georgia’s young, infrequent and hard-to-reach voters for Democrats and helped make her a heroine of the state’s presidential election in 2020.

The years after Biden’s win, though, have been tumultuous in Georgia.

Trump got into a bitter feud with Republican officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, after they rejected his false claims of election fraud. Last year, a grand jury in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, returned an indictment against Trump for his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory that led to the mug shot of a glowering former president. (Not that all Republicans minded: Hours before Trump took the stage in Duluth on Wednesday, the right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson thanked Georgia for “the greatest mug shot in the history of the world.”)

Many Democrats and begrudgingly some Republicans saw 2020 as a proof-of-concept cycle for a party that had little statewide power for close to two decades: Not only did Biden win Georgia, but two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, were also elected to Senate seats.

“What you see is a story of organizing,” said Jonae Wartel, a senior adviser to Harris’ campaign in Georgia who led the coordinated effort in the state between the presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns during the 2021 runoffs. Democrats’ recent wins, she added, are examples of “what it looks like when you invest in the state, when you meet voters where they are and when you commit to mobilizing supporters.”

But the 2022 elections offered Republicans far more solace. Kemp, who narrowly defeated Abrams four years earlier, beat her again — but by a margin of more than 7 percentage points. Still, Warnock, who had won a special election to ascend to the Senate, secured a full term in a runoff that year.

The back-and-forth, set in motion by Georgia’s shifting demographics and then realized by the dueling political operations that Abrams and Kemp built, propelled Georgia to its current uncertain political moment.

In a more recent twist, Kemp and Trump have seemingly suspended their hostilities, though the governor is hardly running around the state as Trump’s champion. Kemp has put his leadership PAC to work down the ballot, organizing for a handful of state House candidates instead of the top of the Republican ticket.

The Harris campaign said Thursday night’s rally in Clarkston, just east of Atlanta, was among the largest of her run. But more than a star-studded show, the event also demonstrated how Democrats may use a plain-spoken, policy-driven message in the campaign’s closing days to appeal to Black voters whose decisions and turnout are central to Democratic ambitions in Georgia.

Gone was the admonishing strategy that Black men were “coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses” not to vote for Harris, as Obama notably put it this month. Instead, Democrats including Perry and Warnock implored voters to consider Trump’s record on matters like housing discrimination and his calls for the later-exonerated Central Park Five to be put to death.

“I’ve watched him, from the Central Park Five to Project 2025,” Perry said of Trump, “and what I realize is that in this Donald Trump America, there is no dream that looks like me.”

It does not take sophisticated number crunching, though, to know that many Georgians are ready for the campaign to end, a sentiment expressed everywhere from church suppers to even the most politically partisan rallies.

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m ready to see some television lawyers for a change,” Deal mused. “Even those are a pleasant break sometimes from the political ads — and being a lawyer myself, I hate those ads.”

Supporters of Trump and Harris generally agree on the contest’s closeness. But they are equally optimistic that their candidates will prevail.

Outside Trump’s town hall in Zebulon, the seat of a county he won by more than 70 percentage points in 2020, his most ardent supporters expressed confidence in his prospects while casting doubt on the outcome of the last presidential contest. Flags saying “Trump Won” waved around the venue, and supporters carried signs saying “Too Big to Rig.”

Brown, the travel agent who saw Harris speak in Atlanta, said the surge of attention from both candidates made her nervous about the possibility that Trump could win Georgia. But she has already planned her trip to Washington for Inauguration Day, certain that Harris will find some way to win the presidency.

“I booked my ticket back in July,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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