Four years ago, Georgia found itself at the center of the political universe after Joe Biden narrowly edged Donald Trump in the once deep-red state, after which Trump set off chaos with a litany of election conspiracy theories. His relentless attacks on Republicans in the state probably helped tip two senate runoff elections to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. But despite those Democratic triumphs (and another Warnock win in 2022), Georgia’s is far from blue — and Harris, with her relative weakness among Black voters, may be more of an underdog this year than Biden was in 2020. Greg Bluestein is a political reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and frequent cable-news guest who wrote a book about the state’s tumultuous 2020 elections. I spoke with him about Harris’s challenges in the state, Governor Brian Kemp’s tortured relationship with Trump, and whether early-voting numbers tell us anything at all.
Decent-quality polls have shown everything from Trump up six there to Harris up one recently. The average is about Trump leading by roughly a point and a half. I saw that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s final poll, which came out about a week ago, had Trump 47, Harris 43, with 8 percent undecided. Do you think it’s plausible that that many people are still undecided at this point?
It’s a good question. Those undecided voters are hard to find, but both campaigns think that there still is a sliver of undecided voters out there, even if they have very different strategies to reach them. The Republicans here in Georgia — or at least— the Trump campaign is really focused on the base, base, base. They’re not really going to the middle. They’re not trying to reach the mainstream Republican voters as much. They feel like the base turnout of getting irregular voters out who would vote Republican, if they went to the ballot box, will do it for them, whereas Harris is doing everything.
The kitchen-sink strategy.
Yeah, exactly. Going for the moderates, going for the liberals, going for it all.
I’ve talked to a bunch of other experts in swing states over the last few weeks, and have asked all of them about this topic. It seems like the Harris campaign has a significant advantage, infrastructurally speaking, and that Trump’s operation is kind of a black box. It relies on outside super PACs, and it’s trying, as you said, to court these people who don’t vote very often. Nobody really knows how it’ll go.
Here they’re relying more on the state Republican Party, which is very closely allied with the campaign. There’s no daylight between them. The Georgia GOP is all in for Trump. Josh McKoon’s the party chairman, and at every rally Trump attends in Georgia, he calls out Josh McKoon. He says, “Thank you, We’re winning in Georgia by lot…” That kind of thing. The state Republican Party is also focused on paying back the legal bills for the Trump co-defendants here. I don’t have the latest tally, but it’s been more than a million bucks on that. There’s also that constellation of outside groups, and they run the gamut. There’s the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which is Ralph........