Gwinnett County is one of Georgia's most important 2024 battlegrounds

ATLANTA — Gwinnett County has turned from a Republican stronghold to a pillar of the Democratic coalition in the past decade. Now, Donald Trump is trying to chip away at Kamala Harris’ suburban firewall, hopeful he can win Georgia if he loses Gwinnett by less.

The rival candidates made back-to-back visits to suburban Atlanta last week, showcasing the region’s growing importance in Georgia’s high-stakes race. Once an afterthought in presidential contests, Gwinnett is front and center in the closing days of the race.

Trump’s strategy relies on eroding Democratic margins in Gwinnett, where he staged his biggest Georgia campaign event of the election cycle Wednesday with a mix of pyrotechnics, barbed attacks and speechifying to ignite the GOP base.

Harris returned to metro Atlanta a day later, shifting plans from holding a rally in Gwinnett after announcing a concert headlined by rock icon Bruce Springsteen. That campaign stop instead was held in nearby Clarkston, a deep-blue area where she also needs big turnout.

Interviews with more than 20 voters, party leaders and officials show how Gwinnett and nearby areas have become an increasingly important battleground for both campaigns.

“For us, Gwinnett demonstrates the opportunity we have in a diverse, suburban county where we’ve seen Trump traditionally underperform,” said Michael Tyler, a Harris deputy. “And our message resonates with voters, some who are tuning in for the first time.”

Chuck Efstration, a Gwinnett Republican who is one of the most influential legislators in the Georgia House, said he’s embracing the attention his county is receiving. After all, even though Trump won only 40% of Gwinnett’s vote in 2020, the roughly 166,000 votes he drew there was more than in every other Georgia county.

“It shows our strategic importance,” said Efstration, who said he’s told conservatives wary of Trump’s return to view the race in a different light.

“It’s about policy over personality. We simply can’t afford four more years of destructive policies we’ve seen in Washington,” he said.

Trump’s campaign calendar tells the tale. At this stage in his 2020 campaign, Trump mostly focused on more rural parts of Georgia, with rallies at airfields outside of Rome and Macon. Now, he’s primarily hunting for more reliably Republican voters in the Atlanta area. Over the past two weeks, he’s held rallies in Cobb County and Gwinnett’s Gas South Arena. And he’s set to return to metro Atlanta on Monday. There’s good reason.

“Trump is strong in some of those other more rural counties already. He needs voters to show up from the suburbs where there’s still a lot of population growth,” said P.K. Martin, a former GOP state legislator from Gwinnett. “And where there are Republicans who maybe don’t love him but who he can still convince that he’s the better option.”

Democrats see greater potential in Gwinnett, too, if more hard-to-reach voters are engaged. The party is microtargeting likely Harris voters with digital ads and mailers in about a dozen languages, Gwinnett Democratic Party Chair Brenda Lopez Romero said. And Harris allies are leaning on local advocacy groups with deep ties to international communities to canvass Gwinnett’s neighborhoods.

“We’re confident we can win the state by just increasing our turnout in Gwinnett by a few percentage points from 2020,” Lopez Romero said.

Gwinnett’s political transformation is intertwined with Trump’s rise to power. Hillary Rodham Clinton stunned many in what had been a Republican bastion for decades by capturing 51% of Gwinnett’s vote in 2016. It made her the first Democrat to win the county since Jimmy Carter was on the ballot.

Two years later, Gwinnett voters elected two Democrats to the County Commission for the first time since the 1980s, along with a Democratic solicitor general.

Then in 2020, Democrats took control of Gwinnett’s government. Democrats flipped the remaining County Commission seats, swept every countywide office and won a majority of the school board. That same election, Democrat Joe Biden won 58% of the county vote, vastly improving on Clinton’s mark four years earlier.

Still, Republicans maintain a foothold. The GOP took back one of the five commission seats in 2022 after a controversial redistricting plan passed, and several Republicans hold swing legislative districts, making Gwinnett a key battleground in the General Assembly.

One of the biggest clashes is over a Duluth-based seat that Republican state Rep. Matt Reeves captured two years ago. To win another term, Reeves almost certainly must outpoll Trump in his district. That’s why on the campaign trail he emphasizes to voters his ties with Gov. Brian Kemp, the state’s popular second-term governor, and his focus on state-based issues.

“They put me in a different category than the White House race, which is very polarized and toxic,” Reeves said. “People are proud of the way Georgia has addressed COVID, inflation and workforce issues. And I think that will get rewarded at the ballot.”

He’s up against Michelle Kang, a longtime advocate for Asian American Georgians who often tells voters her community is far “bigger than the margin of victory” in 2020, when Biden captured the state by fewer than 12,000 votes.

“A second Trump presidency is not in our best interest,” she said at one recent campaign stop before highlighting her support for expanded access to abortion and other issues that could appeal to swing voters in the district, particularly women.

Gwinnett residents such as Kang are helping to drive the county’s competitiveness. The share of Asian American, Black and Latino voters in Gwinnett has increased in every presidential election since 2000, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of voter data found.

Asian American and Latino voters made up 6.5% of voters who participated in the 2008 presidential election. In 2020, their share had grown to 16%. That’s far faster than the growth of those voters in the rest of the state.

Everett Rucker, who is Black, moved to Gwinnett about eight years ago. The software developer voted for Harris on the first day of early voting, saying he’s particularly drawn to her appeal to the middle class.

“I’m excited for a lot of reasons,” Rucker said. “I’m excited to elect the first Black woman president. But most of all, I don’t ever want to hear about Donald Trump ever again. Go live your life. Just stay out of mine.”

The influx of newer left-leaning residents also has inevitably sparked more partisan friction with the older, white voter base that once dominated the county.

“We aren’t turning into the next DeKalb County, but we did go hard Democrat four years ago,” said B.J. Van Gundy, a longtime Republican figure in Gwinnett. “All we need is a 3% or 4% increase coming back in our direction. If that happens, it could change the entire race.”