SAVANNAH, GA. – Vice President Kamala Harris wakes up Thursday in this historic coastal city in Georgia, a crucial presidential election battleground that’s one of seven states that will likely determine the winner of her 2024 face off with former President Trump.
The vice president on Wednesday kicked off a two-day bus swing in southeastern Georgia, accompanied by her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, visiting with faculty and students at a high school before stopping by a barbecue joint.
On Thursday, Harris and Walz will sit for their first major interview before the vice president holds what’s expected to be a large rally in Savannah.
By choosing the Peach State for her first campaign trail swing following last week’s Democratic National Convention, Harris is making a statement – that Georgia is once again in play in November’s election.
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Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris talks as she visits SandFly Bar-B-Q in Savannah, Ga., Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Georgia had long been a reliably red state in White House elections until President Biden narrowly edged then-President Trump in 2020 to become the first Democrat in nearly three decades to capture the state.
Fast-forward to this year’s election, and Trump saw his slight edge in the polls in Georgia over Biden jump to a solid single-digit lead after the president’s disastrous performance in their one debate, a late June showdown in Atlanta.
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But in the 5½ weeks since the vice president replaced her boss atop the Democrats’ 2024 ticket, polls indicate that it’s once again a margin-of-error race in the Peach State.
A Fox News poll conducted August 23-26 in Georgia and released on Wednesday indicated Harris with a razor-thin 50%-48% edge over Trump among registered voters. The most recent Fox News survey in Georgia before Biden dropped out of the race indicated Trump topping the president by six points, 51%-45%.
Georgia’s popular two-term conservative governor agrees that his state’s very competitive.
“Certainly this is a battleground state,” Gov. Brian Kemp emphasized in a Fox News Digital interview on Tuesday.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia is interviewed by Fox News Digital, on June 3, 2024 in Chalmette, Louisiana. (Fox News – Paul Steinhauser)
“I’ve been saying for a long time that the road to the White House is going to run through Georgia. And there’s no path for former President Trump to win, or any Republican … to get to 270 without Georgia,” Kemp said.
But he added that Georgia “should be one that we win if we have all the mechanics that we need. And I’m working hard to help provide those in a lot of ways and turn the Republican vote out and make sure that we win this state in November.”
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So are the Democrats.
“The Georgia Democratic coordinated campaign is running the largest in-state operation of any Democratic presidential campaign cycle, with over 190 Democratic coordinated campaign staff in 24 coordinated offices across the state,” the Harris campaign touted hours ahead of the vice president’s arrival in Savannah.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, poses for a photo with students from Savannah State University, at the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport in Savannah, Ga., Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
This is Harris’ second stop in Georgia since taking over for Biden as the party’s standard-bearer. She previously hosted a large rally in downtown Atlanta.
But this time around, Harris is barnstorming through the southern part of the state, far from Atlanta and its growing suburbs, which make up nearly 60% of Georgia’s population. The traditional route for Democrats to win statewide in Georgia is to concentrate on metropolitan Atlanta.
But Quentin Fulks, who was principal deputy campaign manager under Biden and has remained in that role with Harris, is following the playbook from two years ago when he steered Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s narrow re-election victory over GOP challenger Hershel Walker. The strategy is to not only win big in Atlanta and its suburbs, but also to stay competitive in the rest of the state.
“We have to make sure that we are competing everywhere across the state,” Fulks said Tuesday in an interview on MSNBC. “We’re going to continue to run in rural counties. …. We have to be statewide in that state and even compete in counties that Democrats don’t traditionally go. That is how you win statewide in Georgia.”
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The Harris campaign noted that “campaigning in Southeast Georgia is critical as it represents a diverse coalition of voters, including rural, suburban and urban Georgians — with a large proportion of Black voters and working-class families.”
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks to marching band members at Liberty County High School in Hinesville, Ga., Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
The first stop for Harris and Walz was Liberty County High School in Hinesville, where they met with the school’s administrators, faculty, students and stopped in on the school’s marching band rehearsal.
“We wanted to come by just to let you know that our country is counting on you. All of you,” Harris told the students. “We’re so proud of you. Your generation, all that you guys stand for … is what is going to propel our country into the next era of what we can do and what we can be.”
The vice president told the students that she was in band when she was in high school, according to a pool report.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee took aim at Harris as her bus tour got underway.
“The Trump campaign is fighting and winning in Georgia by building a broad coalition of support from those fed up with her four years of failure in the White House,” senior adviser Brian Hughes told Fox News.
And RNC spokesperson Morgan Ackley argued that “while our highly engaged and energetic operation in Georgia is focused on turning out votes across the entire state, Democrats in Georgia are finally learning an important lesson…there is more to Georgia than just Atlanta.”
Ackley emphasized that “Republicans from Catoosa to Camden County and everywhere in between are fired up and ready to re-elect President Donald J. Trump because his message of putting America first again resonates with Americans of all backgrounds.”
But the Harris campaign appears to enjoy a large organizational advantage over Trump’s team in Georgia. And Republican strategists agreed that to recapture Georgia, Trump will need assistance from Kemp’s well-oiled and funded political machine to turn out GOP voters.
Former President Trump, right, is joined by his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, during at a campaign rally at Georgia State University in Atlanta Aug. 3, 2024. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
For two years after his 2020 election defeat to Biden, which included a razor-thin loss in Georgia, Trump attacked Kemp for failing to overturn the election results in his state.
Trump toned down the criticism in 2022 after Kemp crushed Trump-backed former Sen. David Perdue in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary.
Then, earlier this month, Trump went on a 10-minute tirade against Kemp at a rally in Atlanta just blocks from the Georgia State Capitol. Trump blamed the governor not only for failing to overturn the 2020 vote count but also for not stopping a county prosecutor from indicting the former president for his attempts to reverse the results.
But last week, in a major change of tune, Trump aimed to patch up his differences with Kemp by praising the governor in a social media post.
Kemp told Fox News Digital that “I’ve been consistent for really the last couple of years that I was going to support the ticket, whoever our nominee was, in Georgia. That’s exactly what I’m doing, what I have been doing.”
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Kemp on Thursday will join his wife, Georgia first lady Marty Kemp, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the Trump administration, to headline a fundraiser in Atlanta for the former president.
“It’s my belief that we cannot afford four more years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris or Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, which I think would probably be worse than even Biden and Harris were,” the governor argued.
“I believe Republicans need to stay focused on litigating Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s record. … We need to be telling people why they should vote for us, what we’re going to do to make things better than they are right now.”
Another sign of how important Georgia is in deciding the White House race – the massive amount of money being spent by both the Harris and Trump campaigns to run ads in the state.
The Trump campaign is dishing out nearly $33 million to reserve ad time on Georgia airwaves for the final stretch, with the Harris campaign spending over $42 million.
Spotlighting the stakes, veteran Georgia-based Republican consultant Stephen Lawson noted that “from the Trump-Kemp détente to Harris campaigning in rural Georgia to the massive spending, just continues to underscore that the road to the White House runs through Georgia.”
“That was true in 2020. It’s why Joe Biden is in office right now,” Lawson highlighted.
And looking ahead to this autumn’s presidential election, he added that “I think it will be very, very, difficult for either Harris or Trump to win the White House without winning Georgia.”