ATLANTA ― While Vice President Kamala Harris rallied thousands of her cheering supporters this week, telling them that with their help she would win Georgia and the White House, her fate could well rest with the likes of David Hale, a Republican who wasn’t even in the audience.
Instead, the 25-year-old supervisor at a background check company was 15 miles away in his apartment, making dinner after a day at work.
Even so, Harris is unlikely to find a more committed vote, although he disagrees with most of her policy stances. “Her opponent is an existential threat to the American republic,” he said of the coup-attempting Republican nominee, Donald Trump. “Once we defeat this threat, we can go back to a regular policy debate. But now is not the time.”
President Joe Biden narrowly won Georgia in 2020 thanks to voters like Hale ― who said he voted for Biden but for Republicans the rest of the way down the ticket ― as well as some 27,000 Republicans who left the president line blank and similarly voted for Republicans down ballot.
The question for Democrats is whether Harris, a progressive from California of Indian and Jamaican descent, can repeat the feat of Biden, an older white moderate from Delaware.
Georgia Republicans, even those who say they are supporting Trump only reluctantly, said they already know the answer.
“She won’t win Georgia. But she’s clearly in a honeymoon period,” said Martha Zoller, a GOP consultant and radio talk show host.
Polls taken in the days following Biden’s decision to drop his reelection bid and instead endorse Harris showed Trump holding a small lead over Harris, while those taken more recently show an even race.
Attendees at Harris’ Tuesday rally at the Georgia State Convocation Center just south of downtown Atlanta said that the Obama-2008-level energy on display shows that Georgia Democrats are now motivated and energized, and that there was still plenty of time to do the groundwork needed to turn out the vote for her.
“I’ve been with Kamala since 2019,” said Patricia Fulton, 54, who showed up at the arena wearing handmade Kamala Harris earrings and a Kamala Harris T-shirt from her unsuccessful presidential run in the 2020 Democratic primary.
She said she and her women friends all were behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton eight years ago. “We lost in 2016, and we’ve been waiting since,” she said.
Prominent conservative Erick Erickson, who hosts a syndicated talk radio show from Macon, Georgia, said the increased enthusiasm for Harris will definitely make the race closer than it would have been had Biden remained the nominee. Nevertheless, in the end, high gas prices and high grocery prices will outweigh the exhaustion with Trump that led to his loss four years ago, he said.
In 2020, Biden carried Georgia by 11,779 votes ― a margin well under a single percentage point ― because so many Republicans, predominantly in the affluent suburbs of Atlanta, opted to skip the presidential race on their ballots.
“It’s not that Joe Biden won Georgia; it’s that Donald Trump lost Georgia,” Erickson said, adding that Trump’s banishment from Twitter and Facebook after his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss ironically was key to rehabilitating his image. “People don’t see the tirades. I think that helped him.”
In 2018, state lawmaker Stacey Abrams ran a governor’s race focused on increasing voter turnout among Black Georgians and progressive Democrats, but she nevertheless lost to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp by 54,723 votes. Two years later, Biden ran more of a centrist campaign, promising a return to normalcy following Trump’s chaos, and squeaked out a win.
Geoff Duncan, the former Republican lieutenant governor who broke with his party after the Trump-incited Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, said that Biden’s 2020 run was a better model for Harris’ campaign now. “Her willingness to keep talking about immigration and inflation with a realistic tone will pay dividends in November,” he said.
Duncan previously endorsed Biden and has now endorsed Harris, even attending her rally on Tuesday. “It was a solid step in the right direction to win the hearts and minds of the 10% in the middle that will decide this election,” he said.
Duncan and Hale both supported Nikki Haley in the Georgia presidential primary in March, even though she had already dropped out. They were not alone. In that election, 77,902 voters (13% of those casting ballots) picked Haley over Trump, who had already effectively locked up the nomination.
How many of those refuse to “come home” to Trump in November could determine who wins the state’s 16 electoral votes, which in 2020 went to the Democratic nominee for the first time in a generation.
Even his supporters concede that Trump’s failure to bring them back into the fold could cost him. “I don’t know how many Haley voters he gets,” Erickson said.
The Harris campaign said it is aware of this pool of votes and, apart from trying to maximize Democratic turnout, is also working to win over Republicans disaffected with Trump.
“While the MAGA movement continues to push away voters who care about the future of our democracy, standing strong with our allies against foreign adversaries, and working across the aisle to get things done for the American people, the Harris campaign will keep working hard to earn their support,” Austin Weatherford, the campaign’s director of Republican engagement, said in a statement.
Regardless of her actual chances of succeeding, it is clear that Harris is, at least for the time being, making a serious play for the state.
Political veterans often point out that the most valuable asset of a national campaign is the time of the candidate, particularly in the final stretch. And under that rubric, Harris is investing heavily. Two of the campaign’s first eight rallies will have been in Georgia: Atlanta on Tuesday and Savannah on Aug. 9, in a string of events scheduled to introduce Harris’ running mate.
Hale, for his part, said he wouldn’t mind seeing Harris in person at some point, but that it was not likely to turn him into a liberal Democrat ― or keep him from voting against Trump, just like he did four years ago.
“I didn’t vote for him at the time because he made it clear he wouldn’t accept the results if he didn’t win, which we saw on Jan. 6. That pretty much sealed it for me,” Hale said. “I’ll be voting for Republicans down ballot and Kamala Harris for president.”
