The polls may be misleading – currently the RealClear Politics average has the Biden campaign up .3% in Georgia, with a recent WSB poll showing Biden up +2. There may be some hidden voters out there and Georgia will turn out red just like it has every presidential election since 1992, when Bill Clinton edged out George H.W. Bush by .59% with 43.47% of the vote.
If the Biden campaign is any indication however, it is going to be close. President Trump won the state 50.44% to Hillary Clinton’s 45.35% in 2016. The Biden campaign is hoping to narrow that gap and at least force the Trump campaign to play some defense in a state that just a few months ago was not on anyone’s radar.
Through September, the Biden campaign had done no television advertising in the state but readers may have noticed that changing in October as the Biden campaign is reportedly committing at least $4 million to ads in October and November in the Peach State. In contrast, the Trump campaign and its allies have spent nearly $13 million on network and cable TV advertising. The new spending by Biden is partly reflective of electoral hopes but also driven by a cash advantage of reportedly more than $100 million.
Joe Biden’s wife Jill we be visiting the state next week and will be traveling to Atlanta and Columbus on October 12. Details are still forthcoming but metro Atlanta went pretty hard for Clinton in 2016 – to the shock of some Republicans in the state house and senate who got sent home in upsets – and the metro region is expected to increase that turnout and rate for Biden this time.
Radio and digital ads for Biden have been running for a few weeks, largely targeting Black voters and featuring Biden surrogates former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacy Abrams, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Michael Thurmond, chief executive officer in DeKalb County and former Commissioner of Labor from 1999-2011 – one of the last Democrats to hold statewide office.
These ads are pushing to get more Black men to the polls, as according to Pew Research, only 54% of Black men voted in 2016 compared to 64% of white men. More than one million Georgia voters requested absentee ballots this year, with 54% of them being white and 30% Black. Of all those absentee ballot requests, 25% of them did not vote in the 2016 election. Turnout could be big.
Back in July, when the Biden campaign began ramping up staffing and other efforts in Georgia, newly minted Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien teased the Biden campaign to spend as much as they could in Georgia, noting the Trump campaign has more than 100 full-time staffers in a state that Stepien viewed as safely Republican. Only a few more weeks to see if that calculation is correct.
