In a twist, Donald Trump's campaign takes aim at metro Atlanta in race's final days

ATLANTA — Without a hint of a smile, Republican state Sen. Jason Anavitarte surveyed the crowd Saturday awaiting GOP presidential nominee JD Vance near the state Capitol and declared: “Atlanta is Trump-Vance country.”

It is not. The city and the inner suburbs that surround it are deep-blue bastions that are the largest and most important source of Democratic votes in the state. But Vance’s visit to the Georgia Freight Depot on Saturday illustrated a distinct campaign trend.

Four years ago, former President Donald Trump held rallies at airfields near Rome and Macon just before the election. This campaign, his final events are in vote-rich metro Atlanta, a left-leaning stronghold where there are still plenty of GOP votes to mine.

In the last two weeks, Trump has campaigned in Cobb and Gwinnett counties. He just announced a rally on Monday at Georgia Tech. And on Saturday, Vance visited the heart of downtown Atlanta to plead with the GOP faithful to turn out and vote.

“We are about to fire Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” an upbeat Vance told several hundred people at the brick-walled venue, typically home to lobbyist-funded dinners during the legislative session. Later, he noted the former Trump critics now backing his campaign.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, what can unite Bobby Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley and Brian Kemp?”

The Atlanta-centric strategy has left some scratching their heads. Early voting is turnout is strong in many counties that Trump dominated in the past two election, but it still lags where it was in 2020 in some GOP strongholds in parts of east and north Georgia.

Some Georgia Republicans have privately pleaded with the campaign to dispatch Trump to GOP-friendly areas like Gainesville, Dalton or Perry, where Republicans are pushing for higher turnout during the final week of early voting.

Trump’s campaign could yet add those sites and others outside of Atlanta to his final stretch of visits before next Tuesday’s election. But GOP strategists also point out that there are hundreds of thousands of Trump votes to tap in metro region’s sprawl.

After all, Trump’s three largest sources of votes in the 2020 race came from Gwinnett, Cobb and Fulton counties – each areas that Democrat Joe Biden easily won. Together, they comprised more than 460,000 Trump votes.

“There’s a whole suite of voters in metro Atlanta that have never contemplated voting Republican that will this election,” said Marci McCarthy, the DeKalb GOP chair. “Don’t be surprised if we see big gains in November.”

Democrats dismiss the GOP visits to Atlanta as a waste of time and resources as Harris steps up her focus on the area, too. Harris this week drew an estimated 23,000 supporters to a DeKalb County stadium for her first joint rally with former President Barack Obama.

“We’ve had record early voting turnout which favors Democrats,” said state Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick, a Democrat. “Trump has no policy agenda and is a threat to a democratic Republic. Georgians are smart and know that. He should be nervous.”

As for Vance, his stump speech highlighted familiar themes, bashing Democratic immigration and economic policies. And he mixed it up with local and national reporters after his remarks.

The VP nominee, who recently said he didn’t think Trump lost the 2020 election, said he would “of course” accept the outcome of the race in Georgia if he loses.

But he drew applause when he added the campaign would fight to make sure “every legal ballot – and only every legal ballot – is counted.”

And he said an overhaul of Georgia voting laws, passed by state Republicans in 2021 in the wake of Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, should be a template for the rest of the country.

“If the American people are telling you they’re worried about election integrity, why not do voter ID? Why not do signature matching for mail-in ballots? Why not make it harder for illegal aliens to vote?”