RIVERDALE, Ga. — When union canvasser Tracey Thornhill walked up to a one-story home on a bright, cloudless day in Riverdale, Georgia, a working-class city of 15,000 people south of Atlanta, he found a receptive ear to his pitch about making sure to vote for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump in the November election.
“Trump made a lot of mistakes that his whole camp is just like, it never happened,” a young African American man said through a crack in his screen door, ticking off complaints about the GOP presidential nominee’s first term in office. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t forget things very easily,” he added.
Thornhill — one of 260 members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) knocking on doors in Georgia this month and urging voters to support Harris — thanked the man, reminded him to have a plan to vote, and then set off for the next house in Clayton County, a predominantly Democratic and majority-Black county that is the fifth most populous in Georgia.
“People are always taking the Black community for granted, but now we’re letting them know we can be taken seriously,” the 59-year-old former truck driver from nearby Hampton remarked as he hit the pavement in a pair of white and black Nike shoes. “I don’t think it’s as close as they say it is,” he added in regard to polls showing an extremely tight race in the state.
Four years ago, Black voters in Georgia helped flip the state blue for the first time in decades, electing Joe Biden president and winning Senate seats in a pair of upset runoff elections that gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate — a resounding rebuke of Trumpism and his handling of COVID-19. As a result, the party was able to pass a historic list of achievements, including pandemic relief, lower drug pricing reforms, massive investments in green energy and manufacturing, and the appointment of the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Two years later, one of those senators — Raphael Warnock — delivered another upset, topping Georgia football legend Herschel Walker.
Now, as anxieties grow about cracks in Democrats’ “blue wall” in the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, as well as some polls suggesting that Trump is making gains with Latino and Black voters, the Democratic Party is once again pinning its hopes on the Peach State and its growing minority population to come through for the party and turn the page on Trump once and for all.
“In 2021, Georgia literally saved the country. Now we’re fixin’ to do it again,” Warnock said Thursday before a crowd of 23,000 people who showed up to hear from Harris and former President Barack Obama at a raucous rally in Clarkston, another populous suburb east of Atlanta. “This is more than an election. It’s a moral moment in America.”
Democrats are facing a tougher political environment this time, however. Although the economy has rebounded and inflation is subsiding, Americans still rank the cost of living as the top issue, giving the GOP a critical advantage. Trump’s bungled handling of COVID, which gave Biden an edge in 2020, seems to have faded in voters’ minds as he strokes fears about undocumented immigrants, crime and transgender people in the closing days of the race. In Georgia, Trump currently holds a 1.6 percentage point lead, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling average.
Priorities USA, a top Democratic super PAC, is expecting that this year’s election will be as close or closer than the last two presidential elections. In 2020, for example, Biden won Georgia by a mere 12,000 votes. In 2024, Priorities USA’s projections show a state where the margin will be fewer than 1,000 voters — small enough to automatically trigger a recount.
“There are a few persuadable voters left. No matter how you define them, the audience is clear: young voters, voters of color and women. How they break will shape the election,” Priorities USA said in a poll briefing for reporters last week.
Democrats see reproductive rights as a driver for voter turnout in Georgia, which has the most restrictive abortion law on the books — a six-week abortion ban — in any of the battleground states. At a rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Harris emphasized Trump’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion. She also slammed him for the dismissive way he spoke about the grieving family of a Georgia mother, Amber Thurman, who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill.
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“Where is the compassion?” Harris asked, reacting to Trump’s comments at a Fox News town hall. “He belittles their sorrow, making it about himself and his television ratings. It is cruel. And listen, I promised Amber’s mother that we will always remember her story and speak her name.”
Getting more young people out to vote is another priority for Democratic organizers in Georgia. The New Georgia Project, a nonprofit organization founded by Stacey Abrams that helped turn the state purple by registering thousands of new voters in marginalized communities, has set a goal to knock on 1 million doors this election. So far, it says it’s hit about 600,000 homes.
Three brothers — Mudrik McWilliams, 20, Nassir McWilliams, 20, and Egypt McWilliams, 19 — are part of that effort. When they aren’t playing music or learning to code, they’re knocking on doors together in Fulton County, Atlanta’s largest county, which Democrats are relying on turning out in large numbers to counter Trump’s strength in the vast swathes of rural Georgia.
“There are tangible differences that we can make in our community with our vote. Obviously, change takes time, but there are things we can do,” Mudrik McWilliams told HuffPost as he canvassed a lower-income neighborhood, talking up abortion rights, the child tax credit, funding for HBCUs and reduced prescription drug costs.
“A lot of these communities that still happen to have a lot of Black people in them, lower-income communities, are more affected by propaganda. They are a lot more likely to just believe, ‘Oh, Trump’s going to get us money,’” he continued.
Mudrik also said he has encountered younger people in the community who are drawn to Trump out of misguided notions of “being a contrarian to the point where they see everyone else saying, ‘Hey, I want to vote for Kamala just because she’s Black or because she’s a woman.’ Like, that’s not the case.”
Canvassing is not always a rewarding job. The brothers, two of whom are twins, often found no one home or had moved to another address since the last election. The risk of getting stung by hornets while walking in the Georgia heat posed additional problems.
Harris has made pleas to young voters in the closing days of the race, whom she leads Trump by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics survey conducted this week. At her celebrity-studded rally with Obama outside Atlanta on Thursday, the vice president said young Americans are “rightly impatient for change” and urged them not to give up hope.
“You, who have only known the climate crisis, are leading the charge to protect our planet and our future,” Harris said. “You, young leaders, who grew up with active shooter drills, are fighting to keep our schools safe. You, who know now fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers, are standing up for reproductive freedom.”
Trump is also making targeted efforts to reach young voters, though particularly men, by appearing on podcasts that skew toward Gen Z and embracing cryptocurrency. His campaign has turned over much of its voter turnout efforts to several outside groups, including right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and billionaire Elon Musk’s America PAC, rather than having the campaign itself and the Republican National Committee spearhead the effort. It’s a questionable and risky strategy.
On Wednesday, Trump appeared at a huge Turning Point Action-organized rally in Duluth, a battleground suburb north of Atlanta. It featured pyrotechnics and flashy concert lighting, with country music star Jason Aldean warming up the crowd. And a trio of conspiracy-oriented Trump backers — former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson — joined Trump on stage as guests to deliver remarks. Carlson cast him as America’s “dad” and said he would give the country a “vigorous spanking” with a victory over Harris.
“When Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl,” Carlson said. “You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”
Trump, meanwhile, urged his supporters to vote for him “whichever way you want to do it,” emphasizing his campaign to get Republicans to vote early, something he repeatedly denigrated in prior elections. Georgia has shattered voting records so far, with nearly 2.75 million of its 7.25 million registered voters casting a ballot already. It’s still too early to tell, however, which party is voting in greater numbers and what — if anything — it means for the overall state of the race.
Making his way through a quiet neighborhood street in Riverdale on Friday, Thornhill said he felt confident that Georgia would reject Trump once again and make Harris the country’s first Black woman president.
“It’s so much more at stake now,” he said. “We thought the last election was something because we were going through COVID. This one right here — you talking about a man punishing his enemies and calling in the National Guard — this guy went done flat crazy.”
“We have to do this. We can’t go home,” he added, walking up a driveway to ring another doorbell.