The four factors that could decide Georgia's White House vote

ATLANTA — The presidential candidates have left town and the ad blitz is about to finally end. The final votes in the White House campaign will be cast Tuesday, and Georgia could decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the presidency.

Never mind the plethora of polls that show a toss-up. The candidates themselves are bracing for a tight race in Georgia, which narrowly voted Democratic for the first time in nearly three decades in 2020 after a furious campaign between Trump and Joe Biden.

Georgia is one of the biggest prizes on the battleground map, and both campaigns have poured time and treasure into winning the state in the closing weeks of a campaign that often felt like an extension of the last one.

Much is at stake. Trump’s campaign views Georgia as close to a must-win as it gets. It’s much harder to see a Republican path to victory if he loses the state’s 16 electoral votes, and it’s why Trump held three rallies in Atlanta last month and a finale Sunday in Macon.

“We win this state,” he told cheering crowds on Sunday, “it’s over.”

Harris has more routes to win the White House if she falls short in Georgia, but her repeated visits to the state — including a closing rally Saturday at the Atlanta Civic Center — proves her campaign sees a genuine path to victory here.

“In less than 90 days,” she said to her supporters in a Midtown Atlanta parking lot, “it’s either going to be him or me in the Oval Office.”

More than 4 million Georgians have already cast their ballots, smashing in-person early voting records. After a majority of the state’s electorate has already cast ballots, both rivals are pushing for plenty more to add to the final tally.

Analysts are still sweating and fretting over the numbers. Bobby Saparow, a key adviser to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s reelection campaign, had one takeaway for nervous voters:

“Anyone who tells you they know how this is going to end up is lying to you.”

Here’s what to watch on Election Day in Georgia:

How will the gender gap factor into the race?

There’s been a political divide between male and female voters in Georgia for decades, but this election the gap might as well be a gender chasm.

The last Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll before the election showed Trump leading among men 59% to 28%, while Harris had a 55% to 37% edge with women.

Some of that margin is driven by women who say abortion rights is their top issue, and Harris has leaned into that divide. At every campaign stop, she has pledged to preserve abortion rights — and pummeled Republicans for a 2019 state law that enacted stiff limits.

Senior Democrats say it’s hard to measure how many female swing voters are edging toward Harris. But they are encouraged by a well-respected Iowa poll that showed white women in that deep-red state breaking decisively for Harris.

Trump has tried to sidestep the abortion debate, casting it as a states’ rights issue at a stop in Atlanta earlier this year. But he’s played into the other side of the gender gap with increasingly machismo messaging aimed at driving up the male vote.

More recently, in a bid to drive up minority support, he’s claimed that men of color are losing economic opportunities to people in the country illegally. It’s a largely unproven strategy but one Republicans say could be a significant factor in the race.

Women outvoted men by about 12 percentage points during early voting in Georgia, though both parties expect men to narrow that gap on Election Day. Some Democrats have long-term concerns about the divide.

DeKalb County Chief Executive Michael Thurmond, who leads Georgia’s most important Democratic stronghold, said his party needs to “reengage” with men.

“In a way, we’ve lost our mojo when it comes to working-class voters,” he said. “Not just white men, but men in general.”

How will Georgia’s split-ticket voters break?

The past few election cycles have seen the emergence of a decisive swing voter bloc in Georgia politics.

These split-ticket voters powered Biden’s narrow victory in 2020 and propelled Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate in 2021. And they helped render a mixed verdict in 2022, reelecting Kemp and Warnock in those hard-fought midterms.

If that vote proved anything to Democratic leaders, it’s that the party’s base alone isn’t enough to seal a victory in Georgia. Biden, Ossoff and Warnock each built fragile coalitions that united liberal and Black voters with independent voters and disaffected Republicans.

That same approach has been at the heart of Harris’ kitchen-sink strategy in Georgia, as her campaign tries to drive up excitement within the base while warning more traditional Republican voters of Trump-driven “chaos” if he’s elected to another term.

Some dub those independent voters the “Nikki Haley bloc” after the Republican who captured 77,000 ballots in Georgia’s March primary despite abandoning her White House bid days before the vote.

On the flip side, Trump is largely focused on boosting turnout among the party’s traditional base, while outside groups work to resurrect his “beautiful red wall” by winning big margins in the state’s fast-growing exurban areas and agricultural heartland.

But his campaign can also lay claim to uniting various GOP factions, including patching up a dispute with Kemp and other mainstream Republicans that Trump briefly reopened at a rally in Atlanta.

“You’ve got to ask yourself, what can unite Bobby Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Nikki Haley and Brian Kemp?” U.S. Sen. JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential nominee, said of the pro-Trump alliance last week in Atlanta.

Democratic state Rep. Derrick Jackson, who represents a south metro Atlanta district, sees another force at play as he notes conservatives such as former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and ex-U. S. Rep. Liz Cheney who are stumping for Harris across the nation.

“This,” Jackson said, “is the type of new coalition that will be responsible for her victory.”

Can either candidate win by losing less?

The suburbs of Atlanta have been the single-biggest driving force of Georgia’s transformation from a solidly Republican state to one of the most competitive battlegrounds in the nation.

Hillary Rodham Clinton stunned politicos in 2016 by winning Cobb, Gwinnett and Henry counties for the first time since Jimmy Carter was on the ballot. That trio turned a darker shade of blue in 2020 — cementing the suburbs as a pillar in the Democratic coalition.

But the midterms showed cracks in the foundation. Warnock won Cobb County by a dominant 16 points, but Kemp shaved Stacey Abrams’ margin of victory to just 5 points in the populous suburb. Democrats wonder which path Harris’ will carve.

“A 3% swing in either direction can be anywhere from 9,000 to 12,000 votes,” said Fred Hicks, a Democratic strategist.

Across the northern arc in Gwinnett County, Republicans are also working to cut Trump’s losses. Trump captured only 40% of Gwinnett in 2020, but the roughly 166,000 votes he drew there was more than he captured in any other Georgia county.

Likewise, Democrats have worked to chip away at deep-red strongholds in rural and exurban areas, insistent that growing numbers of minority residents combined with independent-leaning women make it surprisingly fertile ground for Harris votes.

In Forsyth County, for instance, Trump’s share of support fell by about 5 points between 2016 and 2020, as Biden captured about a third of the county’s vote. Democrats hope to slice even deeper by appealing to the area’s burgeoning Asian American population.

“There are plenty of Democratic votes to win here,” Becky Woomer, an influential Democratic activist, said at a recent Forsyth County event. “We have a long way to go to be a blue county, but we’re not an 80-20 county anymore.”

Could Harris be haunted by an exodus of Black support?

Throughout her campaign, Harris — and Biden before her — has been wrestling with what has become a cyclic challenge for Georgia Democrats: worries about softer-than-expected support among Black voters, particularly Black men.

Indeed, some polls showed Harris attracting roughly 75% of Black support, rather than the 90% level party leaders say Democrats need to win statewide in Georgia.

Georgia Democrats have endured these alarms before. Exit polls suggest that, despite all the internal hand-wringing about African American enthusiasm in their 2022 campaigns, Abrams and Warnock both captured 90% of Georgia’s Black vote.

But Harris allies have long been more worried about apathy among voters of color than Trump’s appeal. In short, they see it not as a race between Harris and Trump for Black voters, but between Harris and the couch.

Democrats are cautiously optimistic about high levels of Black early voting turnout. And Saparow, the GOP analyst, said the Republican focus on winning Black men “hasn’t turned out for Trump like folks thought they might” in data modeling and polling.

But much remains up in the air, he cautioned. It was a common refrain from analysts on the election’s eve.

“Vote patterns shifted a lot this year. Nobody knows what all the moving parts of this ultimately mean,” said Spencer Smith, a veteran of several Democratic U.S. House campaigns. “Prepare for a long night. Be patient. And try not to freak out.”

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