Elections
Biden is making a late push for Georgia. Local Democrats were way ahead of him.
Joe Biden’s decision to visit Georgia a week before Election Day is the most serious sign yet that this southern state is on the cusp of slipping away from Republicans.
At the private urging of key elected officials, including most prominently Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to a Democrat familiar with the situation, the Biden campaign has invested in a late push here, including a $10 million ad blitz in the final weeks of the race and a string of visits by both members of the ticket and their spouses within the last nine days. To some Democrats, Georgia now looks like more favorable turf than Ohio, Iowa and even Florida.
This feeling isn’t new to local Democrats. It’s Biden’s high command that had to be convinced Georgia wasn’t a white whale.
“It is Indiana 2008,” said a senior Biden strategist working on Georgia, referring to Barack Obama’s narrow upset in a red state 12 years ago. “There wasn’t a big belief in headquarters that it could be done. Had to push the campaign to do it, but now here we are.”
Before the campaign’s senior leadership was convinced to devote a full day away from the core battleground states for Biden on Tuesday, Democrats on the ground had been growing increasingly confident that Georgia, which no Democratic presidential nominee has won since 1992, could produce the surprise of the 2020 election.
And that was not necessarily due to any particular strength of the Biden operation here, but because of the sustained work from a hodgepodge of local activists that have taken matters into their own hands since suffering narrow losses in high-profile races in 2017 and 2018.
“Georgia Democrats would owe a November victory to the 12th man,” said Atlanta-based Democratic consultant Howard Franklin, using a football analogy about home-field advantage. “You can’t ignore the other 11 players on the field, but if Biden is successful, the 12th man will be a big part of how he wins Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.”
The Biden team has a smaller footprint and invested fewer resources later in the race in Georgia than President Donald Trump’s campaign, which has had more than 100 staff in the state for much of the year. But Democrats like Bianca Keaton have been laying the groundwork for this moment long before it was even clear Biden would be their nominee.
The county party in Gwinnett, Georgia’s second most populous, used to be a “dysfunctional group of misfits,” according to one Democrat here. But once Keaton took the reins as chair in 2019, she professionalized the entity and set a goal of raising $175,000 in 2020, an unheard of sum for a local party that had previously acted more like a social club. With just a week to go, she is closing in on her number, allowing the Gwinnett County Democratic Party to produce its own digital ads for the first time in four different languages and aiding its turnout operation.
The local party has also been operating a “line-warming” program that dispatches volunteers to bring water, snacks and chairs to voters stuck in long waits at the polls, a perpetual problem in Gwinnett, where nearly 60 percent of the population is Black, Hispanic or Asian. On Monday, Democratic leaders called on Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to increase in-person early voting locations for Gwinnett’s 600,000 registered voters.
With nearly 2.8 million votes already banked, Georgia — home to the highest proportion of black voters of any battleground state — is experiencing record early turnout. Keaton said as lines have grown, people have taken it upon themselves to provide supplies out of their own pockets, still driven by Stacey Abrams’ loss in the 2018 governor’s race by 55,000 votes. It’s one sign of the motivation that has blossomed on the ground organically.
“Gwinnett is bigger than five or six states. You have to figure out how you’re going to eat the elephant. I didn’t mean that with a pun but it’s actually a little funny,” Keaton laughed. “You have to take it in bites. You can’t just swallow the whole thing.”
After Abrams notched nearly 57% of the vote in Gwinnett County, Democrats believe if they can lift that percentage to 60%, Biden will carry the state on the strength of a suburban surge. A recent internal Democratic poll that placed the party’s candidate for county commissioner chair at 62% left Keaton heartened.
“And if we hit 62 on a county race, then we would surely get it for the top of the ticket,” she said.
Just as Democrats are relying on the bulk of nearly 800,000 new registered voters in the past year to flip the state, Republicans are banking on an enhanced rural turnout in the northern and southern regions of the state to overwhelm metropolitan Atlanta, one of the fastest growing regions in the nation.
“There’s definitely some headwinds against the GOP in the state of Georgia but I think the ground game has done a very, very good job this year,” said Ryan Caudelle, Trump’s deputy director in Georgia in 2016. “I think it’ll be close, but Trump’s got the edge.”
Abrams’ loss in 2018 and Jon Ossoff’s defeat in a special House election in 2017 were bitter pills for local Democrats to swallow, especially since it signaled to many national donors and Washington operatives that Georgia’s transformation was still another cycle away.
But the defeats produced a progressive political ecosystem the state had always lacked. The Biden campaign largely tapped into the existing Abrams network and fine-tuned its targeting, but had only dedicated a small amount of resources early on to the state, which is also home to two hotly contested Senate races. Democrats noticed in the June primary, GOP Sen. David Perdue outperformed Trump by about 45,000 votes, indicating the president’s base was deteriorating.
“We were neck and neck not doing anything,” conceded the Biden strategist, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “There were a lot of complaints that Georgia wasn’t getting big treatment.”
Trump’s decision to start pouring money into the state — spending more in Georgia than Michigan during September — sounded the alarm for the Biden campaign. Suddenly the foot soldiers on the ground had a case to make to Biden headquarters that a late investment was more than just a gamble.
Schumer, with an eye on helping Democratic Senate candidates who need to reach more than 50% of the vote to avoid Jan. 5 runoffs, was key in helping secure the authorization for a $10 million outlay. Now as the race closes, Atlanta is the country’s second-most saturated TV market for political ads.
“This didn’t just start,” said Nikema Williams, the Georgia Democratic Party chairwoman who is heavily favored to win the open House seat in John Lewis’ Atlanta-based district. “Finally the rest of the country is catching up to what we’ve been saying.”
The Center for American Progress, the liberal D.C. think tank, recently projected that Georgia would be a firmly blue state by 2028.
But for the first time this cycle, some members of Biden’s team are cautiously optimistic it could happen in a week.
“We have a puncher’s chance,” said the Biden operative. “If it was going to flip, this is how it would look.”
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