Harris and Trump campaigns scramble to turn out Georgia voters

ATLANTA- As early voting begins in Georgia Tuesday, campaign staff, volunteers and advocates will fan out across the state, intensifying their push to get voters to the polls.

The presidential race in Georgia between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is essentially tied, according to multiple state surveys.

So, at this point, it’s less about persuasion than turnout. Democrat Joe Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes four years ago.

The bulk of the efforts come from a standard campaign playbook — phone banks, door knocking and rallies. But for both Democrats and Republicans, some of that electoral outreach looks a little different this cycle.

Exciting the Republican base

As the campaign enters the final stretch, Trump’s team is working to excite their base of supporters, not flipping skeptical independents.

They have been short on celebrities and relied more on visits from supporters popular among the hard right. In early October, U.S. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Rome and Matt Gaetz of Florida headlined a Trump bus tour throughout the state. Trump himself will swoop into the state on Tuesday for a rally in Cobb County.

But Trump is not the focus of the formidable grassroots turnout operation built by Brian Kemp during his two terms as governor.

Kemp — who has been in an on-again, off-again feud with Trump — has been mostly focusing on swing legislative districts, spending roughly $2 million on six competitive races across metro Atlanta, said Cody Hall, his senior political adviser. They could ramp up more outreach activities as November nears.

Kemp appeared for the first time since 2020 alongside Trump when the two delivered remarks to the media in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene near Augusta.

In a new twist this year, Trump’s team is also targeting so-called low-propensity voters, a spokesperson for the campaign confirmed. Those are voters who may back Trump but rarely go to the polls.

It’s also included reaching out to voters of color, who have traditionally backed Democrats.

A key player is former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who launched Greater Georgia three years ago as the conservative answer to a voter registration apparatus. It’s partially inspired by New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan operation started by Democrat Stacey Abrams that registers mostly Black, Latino and young voters to vote.

Loeffler said her group is also aiming to go after those voters as well.

“The playbook that we had in terms of reaching out to voters I felt was broken,” she said. “We stopped being the big tent party. We took it down every two years and tried to bring our same people back, and that was causing the party to shrink. So I decided that we would keep the tent up and grow it.”

Loeffler said the group has made 100,000 phone calls in the last eight weeks and has registered at least 40,000 voters since 2021.

There has only been one statewide general election since Greater Georgia’s inception to test how well conservative outreach to diverse voters is going. In 2022, it yielded mixed results: Kemp defeated Abrams, but Republican Herschel Walker failed to stop Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock from returning to office.

In June, prior to the Atlanta CNN debate, and in August, before his rally downtown, Trump held a roundtable discussion with Black business leaders, as the campaign is hoping to peel off Black men in particular, into their coalition.

The Trump campaign has set up more than a dozen campaign offices in Georgia, including one in Gwinnett County, a diverse and densely populated area in metro Atlanta where President Joe Biden won in 2020 with 58% of the vote.

JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, visited the headquarters in Lawrenceville Friday. Repeating statistics from a local staffer, he said the Gwinnett office is communicating with about 10,000 people a week.

“You have no idea how important that is,” Vance said. “I mean, look at the margin in some of these close states.”

On the airwaves, Republicans have spent $29 million in ads that will run between now and the election in support of Trump.

Elon Musk’s America PAC and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition have also been knocking on voters’ doors.

But some in the GOP are less enthused.

“I would say I’m voting for Trump, but I’m not really doing much to support him,” said Jason Shepherd, former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party.

Venturing into far-reaching corners

For Democrats, in-person door-knocking was curbed in 2020, during the pandemic, but now, both the Harris campaign and its local partners have organizers hitting the pavement every day to both persuade undecided voters — a recent poll from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 7% of voters said they had not made up their minds — and turn out likely Democratic voters.

They’ve also been attempting to make inroads in deeply-Republican held areas throughout South Georgia, with visits from Harris and former President Bill Clinton this week.

“It is literally possible that the whole election can be decided here. There are seven states where the election is too close to call. We could win them all — and we can lose them all,” Clinton said at a stop in Columbus Monday.

Some Democrats were nervous earlier this year, as it began to appear that New Georgia Project, which Abrams helped found, was operating in a more limited capacity. Staffers there have knocked on about 500,000 doors through September, compared to about 3 million doors in 2022. In the past six months, four of its executives have resigned or been dismissed due to internal strife, Capital B News reported.

As of the Oct. 7 registration deadline in Georgia, Simran Jadavji, a spokesperson for New Georgia Project Action Fund said the organization has registered more than 55,000 voters. Since 2020, the group has registered more than 150,000.

Fair Fight, the other political and advocacy organization Abrams founded after her 2018 defeat, shifted its focus to litigation and has faced financial challenges of its own. The organization laid off staffers earlier this year as it struggled with mounting debt from drawn-out court battles.

But other organizations have stepped in to fill the void, Hillary Holley, executive director of Care in Action, said. Those include Black voters Matter, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, the Working Families Party, the Black male Initiative Fund and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Holley’s organization is one of several progressive groups reaching out to Democratic-leaning voters in the state, educating them about issues and ensuring they vote by Nov. 5.

“Yes, New Georgia project looks a lot different from it did four years ago. Yes, Fair Fight looks a lot different from four years ago,” she said. “However, those two entities were a piece, and they were a good piece, but the other organizations that have lasting, existing infrastructure, they’ve been able to absorb a lot of that.”

Since this summer, their volunteers have been aiming to talk with 2.7 million voters, mostly Black and brown women, and knock on 96,000 doors.

Harris has seen an infusion energy from celebrity backers. Actress and Georgia native Julia Roberts stumped for Harris and Megan Thee Stallion performed at a rally for the vice president in Atlanta.

Harris’ campaign also has support from unions, even though they make up a small percentage of Georgia’s workforce.

“We have people from all the unions on the ground talking to their coworkers, knocking on their coworkers doors, talking to their families,” Yvonne Brooks, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, told the Politically Georgia radio show.

The Harris campaign also has $31 million in ads supporting the candidate across Georgia’s digital, radio and television platforms planned for the next three weeks. They’ve opened 32 offices throughout the state and have more than 220 staff working in Georgia. As of this past weekend, the campaign has knocked more than 1 million doors across the state and has made more than 2 million phone calls.

“It comes down to the campaigns working in tandem with grassroots organizers,” said state Sen. Jason Esteves, treasurer of the Democratic Party of Georgia. “You really need both ingredients to win in Georgia.”

Staff Reporter Greg Bluestein contributed to this story.