Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Wikimedia Commons
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 Reed’s outfit; there’s Elon Musk’s group. The former senator Kelly Loeffler has a group called Greater Georgia, and that’s aimed at turning out Republican voters.
When I think “proven winner in Georgia,” I think Kelly Loeffler.
She’s got a lot of money and she does have that network, that long list of voter contacts that she accrued from the most expensive race we’ve ever had in Georgia — the 2020 campaign, counting all those races together. Then Governor Kemp joined the fight. There’s going to be at least a million dollars in spending from his organization, Hardworking Americans, thanks to some late donations from Trump megadonors.
It might surprise people to know that the state Republican Party is so aligned with Trump, because Kemp famously wasn’t for a long time. There was a lot of bad blood between them, but I get the sense you don’t think this matters in terms of the infrastructure supporting Trump in the state.
Kemp doesn’t control the state Republican GOP.
I just thought it might flow down from there, just philosophically.
Basically the Georgia GOP is far more to the right, and it’s always been. There have been clashes between governors and the state GOP in the past. But you’re right — Kemp himself has not been aligned closely with Trump, I think it’s safe to say. Back in 2018, Trump’s endorsement helped Kemp win a runaway victory in the Republican runoff that year, and then it helped him beat Stacey Abrams in November of 2018 by about 55,000 votes.
But since then, even before the 2020 election, there started to be a little bit more friction between the two. After the election, it just went off the rails. Trump blamed Kemp for his defeat, and ended up ultimately recruiting David Perdue to run against him, promising him all sorts of help. Trump ended up spending more time and resources on that primary, I think, than pretty much any other primary challenge he was involved in. He cut ads for him, did rallies for him, made all these appeals for him.
And it failed miserably.
Right. Kemp comes out on the other side, and he’s in this weird spot where he’s a national figure now. He beat Stacey Abrams twice. He beat a Democratic superstar and a Trump-backed challenger in one election cycle. He’s super popular in polls. Our latest poll I think has him at 56 percent approval, which, in Georgia, is pretty significant.
That’s good anywhere.
That’s good anywhere, but in Georgia, man, that’s something. He’s looking at a future — he might run for senate, he might run for president, so he doesn’t want to be blamed for Trump’s defeat here. He had been reluctant about it at first. Now he’s all in.
You don’t think he’s saying one thing publicly and not actually trying that hard to elect Trump?
Is he going to be front and center at rallies? No. He still hasn’t been featured at any Donald Trump rally since 2020, but he did make nice with Trump at a Hurricane Helene-related event in Augusta, where they talked about the devastation from the hurricane.
It’s hard to characterize it. He’s not going to quit his job and go on the campaign trail for Donald Trump right now, but he’s also helping. I’ll put it this way: From the shrewd analytical outside view of it, he’s doing enough so that if Donald Trump loses Georgia, it’ll be really hard to blame Brian Kemp.
I guess it’s unclear whether Trump losing would be better or worse for his political future.
Nobody will ever say this, but the really cynical view of it for anyone — not just Kemp, but anyone running for office in Georgia if you’re Republican — is you want Trump to win the state but lose the election. That’ll make it easier to run against someone in 2026 and call them a Harris Democrat. Because, odds are, Harris’s approval rating will be low in Georgia at that point, just historically speaking.
There’s been a lot of conflict over local election rules in Georgia that could have threatened election certification, or at least delayed it. Has the state safeguarded things enough that it would be impossible to challenge the results in any real way?
It looks like court rulings have taken a lot of the drama out of all this. There was a series of them a couple days ago: One said that counties have to certify their election by the deadline, which answered the question about whether or not some small rural county can hold out. Another ruling said that there shouldn’t be hand counting or reasonable inquiry. Then another ruling blocked every single rule change. And the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously knocked them down, too. All this means less infighting. It won’t stop it, but it means that there’s not going to be the kind of stuff that really confuses elections officials.
There’s no legal mechanism here anymore, but people will still find a way.
In 2020, we still saw all sorts of crack lawsuits that didn’t make any sense. They didn’t go anywhere. This will not stop litigation if someone wants to bring it, but it sets up a hell of a firewall.
Poll after poll of Georgia, and the country, shows that Kamala Harris is weaker than Joe Biden was with Black voters, especially younger Black voters, and especially younger Black men. I know the Harris campaign has deployed various surrogates down there, Obama and others, to try and change the situation. Do you feel like they’ve made any headway on that?
They’re working at it. Last week, Barack Obama had his first joint rally with Kamala Harris right down the street in Clarkston, Georgia, which is a suburb of Metro Atlanta in deep blue DeKalb County — the most important Democratic county for Harris. Speaker after speaker made one real big point, starting with the DeKalb County CEO, Michael Thurmond. He goes, “Hey, guys. I’m a Black man, and I’m all in for Kamala Harris.” Senator Warnock said the same thing. They had Tyler Perry, they had Spike Lee, they had Samuel L. Jackson, not to mention Obama. They had a number of big-time, very respected Black men, all men, speaking about her ahead of her speech.
I’m looking at the Georgia early voting numbers right now. We don’t know who voted for which candidate, of course, but we know that Black turnout is under what it should be, or what Democrats hope it will be, at least. It’s hard to completely tell, but it says 26 percent of early voters are Black. It also says 9.2 percent are “other.” A lot of Black voters say “other” — there’s a longstanding tradition of that in places like Georgia, so the Black turnout could be higher than 26 percent. Democrats want it to be at 30 plus. So there’s that worry. But it’s 56 percent female turnout so far, and Harris is just dominating in the gender gap among women. That’s a good sign for Harris.
Though it’s mostly almost completely a fool’s errand to try to understand early-voting data. I talked to Jon Ralston in Nevada, and even he is having trouble this year with it.
He is. I know. It’s fascinating watching.
And yet I’m asking you about it anyway. Are there any other patterns you’re picking up? Is it even possible to compare anything to 2020, given the number of mail ballots then and the uniqueness of that election?
It’s not just the mail that was unique about that election. We’re setting all sorts of records here with in-person turnout, but the mail turnout in 2020 still far exceeds where it is this year, and for obvious reasons. You had the pandemic. Everyone was mailed absentee ballot request forms. That didn’t happen this cycle.
The other big thing that’s changed is a pretty obvious one: Trump’s campaign is pushing early voting, and they didn’t in 2020. They might have given it lip service here and there, but they didn’t aggressively urge Republicans in Georgia to vote early. We have a three-week early voting process, and it’s such a staple of voting in Georgia now. Democrats took advantage of that. They embraced it. They were aggressive about it. They would bank all these votes, and they’d talk about making a plan to vote. It became a part of a Democratic pattern of voting, but Republicans did not nearly embrace it to the level that they are now. At Trump’s rally a few days ago, there were signs all over saying, “Go vote early.” Even Trump, who has falsely linked early voting to fraud, and all that kind of stuff, even he’s saying, “I don’t care how you vote, just go vote.” He said that at the rally.
We’re not sure how much of an impact it will have on the actual final numbers. Are these a lot of new or younger Republicans who are voting early, or are these people who would otherwise vote on Election Day going earlier?
I’ve noticed that pattern in Nevada, and every other state too. Republicans seem to actually be doing it this year, which is a big thing.
Exactly. The other big aspect here is the split-ticket voter. The voters in the last three election cycles in Georgia have been decisive. They’ve made the margin for Biden. They were the margin for Governor Kemp winning and the margin for Senator Warnock winning. They’re the margin also in Warnock. That’s going to be a pivotal role. Trump isn’t really messaging to them directly, he’s just doing his campaign strategy of trying to turn out base voters. And Harris—
Harris is messaging to them aggressively.
Always is. Whether it be abortion, whether it be guns, whether it be direct appeals to have Republicans like Geoff Duncan go out and make phone calls…they’re hardcore.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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