Georgia on my mind

Both good news and worrying news

Friends,

Georgia is back in play. Just over a month ago, Democrats had all but written it off. It’s now one of six major states that could go either way.

Yesterday, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz kicked off their first post-convention campaign swing with a bus tour through rural southeast Georgia, culminating in a rally today in Savannah.

Conventional wisdom holds that Democrats only win elections in the South with the help of voters in places like metropolitan Atlanta, who tend to be better-educated and more liberal.

So why are Harris and Walz spending time in rural southeast Georgia? Because they need rural voters — especially Black voters who comprise about a quarter of the state’s rural population, to offset Trump’s potential win of white rural voters.

It’s similar in North Carolina, whose urban-suburban “research triangle” has generated most Democratic voters over the last several election cycles but whose rural Black population could offset white rural Trumpers. Black voters comprise more than a third of the population in 17 North Carolina counties.

Trump continues to have a slight edge in recent Georgia state polling but that edge may be waning quickly. His antics in 2020 and 2022 cost Republicans a Senate seat or two, and he has only recently stopped feuding with the state’s popular governor, Brian Kemp.

Harris and Walz’s rural bus tour signals they have several paths to winning 270 electoral votes, compared to the limited number that had been open to Biden, and compared to Trump-Vance.

Since Harris and Walz are easily packing rallies in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee — big, blue swing-state cities — it makes sense for them to gather votes in the rural South. It also signals to the Trump campaign — and to America — that Harris-Walz is a “unity” ticket appealing to a diverse America.

Trump and Vance haven’t given up on Georgia. But if Vance’s awkward visit to a rural Georgia donut shop earlier this week is any indication (see clip, below), they don’t know what they’re doing there.

Georgia may still be treacherous for Harris-Walz because of election rules recently green-lighted by three Trump-approved members of the Republican-controlled Georgia state election board.

The new rules allow county election officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into the accuracy of results before certifying them, and allow individual members of county election boards to “examine” election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.

“Reasonable inquiries” and “examinations” won’t necessarily cause certifications to run past the legal deadline — thereby allowing Republicans in Congress to question their legality and help push the election into the House. But Georgia’s new rules give officials license to hunt for election irregularities, and move certification past the deadlines. Since 2020, many Georgia county election officials have objected to certifying elections, including one county official as recently as March of this year.

On August 3, at a rally in Georgia, Trump congratulated the three Republican state election board members who came up with the new rules, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.”

Fortunately, Democrats aren’t passively accepting this. On Monday, several Georgia election officials and the Democratic Party sued the Georgia State Election Board, claiming the new rules violate state and federal election laws. They’re asking the Fulton County Superior Court “to prevent chaos in November” by making clear — through a “declaratory judgment” — that the state deadlines for certifying the results are mandatory and the new rules don’t change that.

Remember: Winning on November 5 is necessary but not sufficient.

We must also maintain vigilance over who will be running the election machinery. Notify state and national levels of the Democratic Party of any serious potential irregularities so they can focus their small army of lawyers on them, as they’re doing in Georgia.