ATLANTA — Four years ago, Deborah Scott played a key role in helping President Biden win Georgia, leading a band of mostly Black women to canvass, phone bank, even dance outside polling stations as part of a movement that helped flip this historically conservative Southern state blue.
But even as the grassroots organizing dynamo hustles to get out the vote this year, she is not sure she and other Black and brown organizers can coax and inspire enough voters to the polls to deliver another win for Democrats.
“I don’t feel confident of anything,” the chief executive of Georgia STAND-UP said as she took a break Friday from bopping to Southern trap outside a polling station in a historic Black neighborhood of southwest Atlanta and waving a sign that said “YOU have the POWER.”
Scott’s team has 200 people calling and knocking on doors and has sent out more than 1.5 million text messages. On the last day of early voting, they had a DJ cranking out rap from Young Jeezy and Waka Flocka Flame, and a line of food trucks serving free French fries, Philly cheesesteaks and shaved ice.
“We know that early voting is up all the way around, which is good,” Scott said. “We just want to make sure it’s good votes — progressive votes.”
Early voter turnout in Georgia has been historic. But after early voting wrapped up Friday with more than 4 million Georgians casting a ballot — 3% higher than in 2020 — it is still hard to predict who will win: GOP strategists point to the fact that early voters in this election skew white and older, demographics that typically vote Republican, while Democrats emphasize the high turnout of women and Democratic-leaning voters who did not vote in 2020.
Some voters in Atlanta are confident of a Harris victory even as polls show Trump ahead in Georgia by about 1.5 percentage points, well within the margin of error.
“It should not be this close,” Teddy Woodson, a 30-year-old student, said after he cast his ballot for Harris at a library in Southwest Atlanta. “She should be winning by a landslide, but I know she’s going to win. … I can’t wait for Tuesday, when we get to victory.”
Others said they were concerned that Trump had won over a large number of voters across rural Georgia.
“I’m hopeful, but I’m also trepidatious and scared about what the possible outcome is going to be,” Maisha Baucham said as she exited the polling station.
The 50-year-old judicial administrator who lives in Atlanta’s historic West End, said whenever she left the city to drive out to neighboring counties for her son’s soccer games, she saw a growing number of Trump signs.
Most experts agree that early voting data cannot be compared to 2020, an outlier year because of the pandemic.
After President Biden won in Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020, Republicans realized they made a tactical error by pushing their supporters away from early voting. This year, the strongest surge in voter turnout in Georgia isn’t in the Democratic bastions of metro Atlanta, but in rural red counties, such as Pickens County, a North Georgia county that voted 82% for Trump in 2020 and has seen 157% more early voters this year.
With turnout among Black voters, who make up a third of Georgia’s population and form the backbone of the state’s Democratic Party, making up just 26% of the early vote, some Republicans are confident Trump will prevail on election day.
“Trump’s on a pathway to winning Georgia,” said Brian Robinson, a GOP strategist and former communications director for former Gov. Nathan Deal. “Democrats have to have a really incredible election day to win, because the Black vote is nowhere near where it needs to be for Democrats to win statewide.”
But Democrats counter that Black voter turnout is not as low as it appears.
Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic firm that specializes in political data, said part of the lag in Black voter turnout is because Georgia recently changed its rules, allowing registered voters to register as “other” for their race. His modeling assumes a portion of the 9.5% of “other” early voters are Black and estimates Black turnout at 29% — about 2 percentage points lower than 2020.
“There’s no doubt there’s a lag there,” Bonier said. “But that’s driven primarily by the fact that you just have white voters pivoting from election day to early voting. It’s not new votes.”
In a promising sign for Democrats, women have voted early in greater numbers than men: Nearly 56% of those who cast ballots were women, compared with 44% men. But although women have gravitated away from Trump after his Supreme Court appointees helped overturn Roe vs. Wade in 2022, the Trump campaign is trying to make a last-ditch appeal to Georgia women. On Saturday evening, Lara Trump joined South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and other female Trump supporters in Atlanta for a “Team Trump Women’s Tour.”
Democrats are also outpacing Republicans in new voters: 11% of likely Democratic votes were those who didn’t vote in 2020, Bonier noted, compared to less than 10% on the Republican side.
“The fact that Democrats have generated more new voters than Republicans is really a good sign for Democratic intensity,” Bonier said. “Otherwise, it’s just Republicans shifting votes around and they’re losing election day votes.”
Touching down in Atlanta Saturday for a rally with film director Spike Lee and rapper 2 Chainz, Harris told her supporters they had hard work ahead.
“Atlanta, we have three days to get this thing done, and no one can sit on the sidelines,” she said. “Let’s knock on doors, let’s text, let’s call voters. Let’s reach out to family and friends and classmates and neighbors and co-workers and new play cousins.”
Harris described Trump, who will hold a rally Sunday in Macon, Ga., as “increasingly unstable” and “out for unchecked power.”
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of Donald Trump,” Harris said. “He’s trying to keep us divided and afraid of each other. We’re done with that. We’re exhausted.”
“We’re not going back!” the crowd chanted.
The trajectory of Georgia’s political realignment has been dramatic over the last decade and a half as its population has swelled from 9.6 million to 10.7 million and a growing number of Asians and Latinos have moved to the state as Black people have migrated from northern cities. Nearly 12% of its population is now foreign born.
In 2012, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney won Georgia by 8 percentage points; in 2016, Trump won by 5 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.
But that doesn’t mean Democratic victories in Georgia are inevitable. Republicans scored key victories in 2022, with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp beating Democrat Stacey Abrams by more than 7 percentage points.
“We lean red, and and that only applies when we have a good candidate and the Democrats don’t,” Robinson said. “A really good Democrat and a bad Republican, the Democrat can win.”
Asked if voters consider Trump a better candidate than they did in 2020, Robinson said he thought many white college-educated Republicans in Georgia who had abandoned the GOP in the Trump era had drifted back at the same time as Republicans were attracting more Black and Latino men.
He acknowledged not knowing how many of the 58% white early voters had cast a ballot for Harris.
“I just have a hunch that she ain’t winning enough of them,” Robinson said.
Even if Harris won Georgia this year, Scott said, strong voter outreach and engagement would be necessary in the coming years.
“We can’t say, ‘Black and brown people and progressive people have decided on who the president’s going to be, and now we can go back to normal,’” she said. “This is the new normal — that Georgia will continue to be the battleground state.”
