Democrats are chasing a high-risk, high-reward strategy in Georgia

Kamala Harris returns to Georgia this week in her first post-convention campaign stop — and she’s swinging through a part of the state Democrats at the top of the ticket have long ignored in the final stretch to Election Day.

The vice president and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are setting off on a bus tour in southeast Georgia on Wednesday, where they’ll meet with supporters, small business owners and voters. Harris will finish it out with a rally Thursday night in Savannah, part of the campaign’s renewed effort to prioritize the battleground state now that her team believes it’s in play.

The vice president’s campaign isn’t just relying on metro Atlanta’s bluest counties, a strategy that speaks to the lessons gleaned from President Joe Biden’s ultra slim victory in 2020, when he flipped the swing state by less than 12,000 votes. If Democrats want to win Georgia again, they also must continue to improve their margins in the state’s urban, suburban and rural areas outside the perimeter, too, particularly among Black and working class voters.

“They are campaigning all across this country, and they see a path through Georgia. We have multiple paths to 270 so that we can win the White House once again, and coming to Georgia is an affirmation that we are still a battleground state, we are still in this,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), chair of the state Democratic Party. “And they know just like we know — that we’ve been counted out before.”

It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy, returning to the trail after the convention to visit a state many Democrats feared was out of reach in recent months. And with roughly two months until Election Day, Harris and Walz are in a race to try to make up for lost time. Former President Donald Trump has campaigned in Atlanta, but also outside the metro area in places like Rome, Dalton, Commerce and Valdosta.

“While our highly engaged and energetic operation in Georgia is focused on turning out votes across the entire state, Democrats in Georgia are finally learning an important lesson…there is more to Georgia than just Atlanta,” said RNC spokesperson Morgan Ackley.

While the latest polls still show Trump with a slight lead in Georgia, Harris has started to close the gap there since Biden exited the race, and her aides argue it’s one of the Sun Belt states that has become more competitive with her at the top of the ticket. They believe that makes it worth spending time there in the final election stretch, even as they also need to make a serious play for the competitive blue wall states in the Midwest.

“This is going to be a tight race, and it’s going to be won on the margins. So I really think it’s important to underscore that Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Walz are fighting for every single vote,” said veteran strategist Jonae Wartel, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Georgia. “And that’s a statewide strategy, especially in a place like Georgia. Her having these rallies in Atlanta and metro Atlanta is great but also having her in south Georgia — it represents the coalition of voters in going to power this election.”

Democrats have benefited from Georgia’s population growing larger and more diverse, as well as the years of work activists have been doing in the state to turn out first-time voters, many young and voters of color, who helped send Biden over the top four years ago. And the Harris campaign’s strategy also pulls a page directly from Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock ’s winning playbook in 2021 and 2022, when his campaign appealed to swing voters and drove up turnout among rural and Black voters across the state.

“The win in 2020 did not start with work in 2020. The work had started long before that, and it was a culminating moment,” said Ranada Robinson, research director at the New Georgia Project Action Fund. “So even if we are working for this year’s election, we have to be focused on the future and not only creating but maintaining the infrastructure — where we’re building the relationships with these voters.”

In past cycles, Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton rarely made appearances in the state once they locked up the party’s nomination, as Democrats at the top of the ticket wrote it off as a GOP shoo-in. Biden, who became the first Democratic nominee to win Georgia in 28 years, made gains in parts of the state Harris’ team hopes to expand on. ( Biden also closed his 2020 campaign with a speech in Warm Springs, Georgia.) Compared with 2016, Democrats in 2020 netted roughly 10,000 more votes in Savannah’s Chatham County, and another 1,700 votes in Liberty County — margins that can make or break a battleground race.

Harris aides point to their opponent’s surge in spending as a sign of GOP unease amid Harris’ emergence. The Trump campaign and the biggest Trump-aligned super PAC spent four times as much on TV ads in Georgia in the first two weeks of Harris’ campaign than in the entire rest of the 2024 race. The former president has also tried to make nice with Georgia’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, after publicly feuding with him — slights his allies have feared could hurt his prospects in the state.

Harris’ bus tour will mark her seventh trip to the state this year. She held a rally in Atlanta earlier this month, featuring Megan Thee Stallion, her first as the presumed Democratic presidential nominee. And the campaign has seen a groundswell of momentum since Harris launched, with more than 35,000 volunteers joining since she announced her campaign. They also have almost 50 full-time staff across seven offices in southern Georgia, including in Valdosta, where Trump carried in 2020.

“Georgia is bigger than just Atlanta,” said Gerald Griggs, a voting rights activist and the president of the Atlanta NAACP. “We need to recognize where a large majority of diverse voters are, and that would be in the south. Places where people had written it off — and places where voters had written off both parties because they don’t engage with them.”