FAYETTEVILLE, Georgia – President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will meet for their first general election debate Thursday in Georgiathe battleground that yielded the closest margin of any state in 2020 and became the epicenter of Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s election.
Now, in the rematch, Georgia will test which man can best put together a winning coalition, despite their respective weaknesses. Each must convince grumpy voters in places like Fayette County, a suburb south of Atlanta, that they are less scary than the alternative.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the third time in a row, was condemned of serious crimes and is awaiting sentencing and three more criminal trials, including in Atlanta. This legal peril could exacerbate his struggles with moderate and independent Republicans, some of whom abandoned him as he helped dismantle the constitutional right to abortion and refused to accept defeat in 2020.
Biden, the incumbent Democrat, has presided over an inflationary economy, grappled with a war in the Middle East that divides Democrats and failed to resolve immigration problems along the U.S. southern border. He faces potential defections from non-white and younger voters.
One of Georgia’s wealthiest counties, Fayette has long been home to retirees and Delta Air Lines workers seeking homes near the Atlanta airport. Now it is also a Georgian bastion subsidized by the statefilm industry. At the Trillith development, a rapidly growing city and upscale film studio, workers can be heard discussing the latest Captain America film being filmed there.
Like other Atlanta suburbs, the county of 120,000 people is leaning left. Democrats have yet to unseat Fayette’s Republican majority, but they came close in December 2022 when Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock won 49.5% of Fayette’s vote in defeating Republican Herschel Walker.
“We believe the path to the presidency runs straight through Fayette County this year,” said Joe Clark, chairman of the Fayette County Democratic Party and member of the Fayetteville City Council.
The Trump campaign opened its first campaign office in Georgia on June 13, in Fayetteville.
“They want to try to turn our county around”, he warned Brian Jacka former Trump aide who recently won the Republican Party nomination for a seat in the Republican-leaning Congress.
Statewide, Republicans say Georgia still leans in their favor. Yes, Democrats have won statewide four times in Georgia, starting with Biden in 2020, continuing as Jon Ossoff and Warnock advanced to twin victories in a 2021 runoff that won Democratic control of the U.S. Senate and culminated in Warnock’s re-election in 2022. But the Republican Party Governor Brian Kemp won a second term as governor in 2022 over Democrat Stacy Abrams for one comfortable marginsweeping election offices along the way.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ chief strategist, said Democrats were slow to engage in Georgia in 2020. Both sides have been spending heavily this year.
“This is the first time since the 1990s that Georgia has been a high-profile presidential battleground state on both sides of the aisle since the start of both campaigns,” Groh-Wargo said.
Both sides have work to do. Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, say they are discouraged by the rematch between Trump and Biden. Some say they are not sure whether they will vote.
Robert Kennedy Jr. the standalone offering is another wildcard. Kennedy has not been certified for the vote, but it could make Georgia even more difficult to predict.
Some previously solid Republicans began to split their candidacies. Trump and Walker showed weakness in metro Atlanta, although Kemp remained strong.
Quentin Fulksa southwest Georgia native who is Biden’s top deputy campaign manager and ran Warnock’s 2022 campaign, estimates that Warnock won 9% of Republican voters.
“The quality of the candidate matters,” said Republican strategist Brian Robinson. Trump initiated “a true realignment” that drew working-class voters without college degrees to the Republicans, Robinson said, but alienated college-educated voters.
Some of these voters “still want to vote Republican or are willing to do so,” but only under the right circumstances. In Georgia’s Republican presidential primary in March, about 78,000 voters — mostly in metro Atlanta — voted for Nikki Haley over Trump, even after Haley suspended his campaign. Haley’s total was more than six times Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia in 2020.
Fayette ranks seventh among Georgia’s 159 counties in voters who supported Kemp but not Walker. Haley won 13.2% statewide but nearly 19% in Fayette County.
Rhonda Quillian, shopping at a Peachtree City farmers market, supported Haley. She says neither Biden nor Trump seem like an option to her. She is thinking about not voting.
Quillian said he liked Trump’s policies after voting for him in 2016, but was angered by him, especially after January 6, 2021, Riot at the Capitol.
“If he wasn’t so self-centered, I’d vote for him in a minute because of the policies,” Quillian said. “But he gets a little scary when he starts talking and trying to overturn the election and be anti-constitutional and, you know, ‘I am the law.’ I’m sorry, no, this is a democratic republic.”
For Biden, the challenge is to replicate the coalition that provided his minimum margin. Responding to warnings from Georgia Democrats that he must engage with black votersthe president has visited regularly, and Vice President Kamala Harris has made five trips to Georgia this year.
“We have to talk to Black voters in urban and rural Georgia,” Fulks said.
Trump has boasted that he will make inroads between Black voters. Robinson acknowledged that Trump is unlikely to turn out at least a fifth of black voters, but said it wouldn’t necessarily be necessary: Black voters typically make up about 30% of the vote in Georgia. If some black voters stay home or if Biden’s turnout drops a bit, Trump could benefit.
Deidra Ellington, a counselor who lives in Fayetteville, calls the choice between Biden and Trump a “slim choice.” Ellington, who is black, says she no longer feels loyalty to either party.
“We’re almost to the point where you can’t even live paycheck to paycheck,” Ellington said. “You get your first paycheck and then you apply for a loan before your next paycheck.”
On a April poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, more Democrats said Biden hurt than helped on the cost of living and immigration. The Biden campaign has tried ease this pain.
“The president deeply understands what Americans are going through and also the fact that there is more work to do,” Fulks said.
Republicans, however, intend to turn the election into a referendum on Biden’s handling of the economy.
“My point is, are you happy with $4 a gallon for gas and $6 for a jar of mayonnaise? If it’s not, it wasn’t like that when Trump was in office,” said Suzanne Brown, a member of the Peachtree City Council who campaigned for Republicans this spring.
Democrats say they are surpassing Trump, aiming to turn out fringe Democrats and persuade independents and moderate Republicans to support Biden. The campaign has a dozen offices and 75 staffers across the state, including some in Fayetteville.
“I think Trump is underestimating the power of organizing,” Fulks said.
Not so, says Republican National Committee spokesman Henry Scavone. He says the Trump campaign has gone from zero to a dozen offices since June 13.
Republicans, voters aware that they are in a bad mood, are optimistic but not arrogant about places like Fayette County.
“If the election were held today, Donald Trump would almost certainly win here,” Robinson said. “But the election will not be held today.”
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Barrow reported from Atlanta.
