MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In Atlanta, where we are reporting all this week and where voters find themselves in a familiar election year position. Voters here in Georgia are inundated by political ads, bombarded by visits from the campaigns. JD Vance is here tonight. Tim Walz rolls into town for events tomorrow. This is all because Georgia is once again seen as a must win for both Vice President Harris and former President Trump. Well, NPR's Stephen Fowler has been traveling this state to get a sense of how the race is shaking out. He too is in Atlanta, although a different part of town. So, Stephen, I'm waving at you from our hotel. Thanks for being with us.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: Thanks for having me.
KELLY: OK, so to remind, Biden won Georgia back in 2020. It was really close - less than 12,000 votes. And this year, we're looking at polls suggesting it's going to be a razor-thin race again. I want you to catch us up on how both parties are thinking about that. Start, if you would, with how Democrats, how the Harris campaign are thinking about trying to keep Georgia blue.
FOWLER: So the Harris campaign has to rebuild Biden's 2020 coalition. It was a hodgepodge of different groups from the party's base of Black voters to moderates in Atlanta suburbs turned off by Trump. But an underrated piece of the puzzle was Biden losing by less in many rural parts of the state, particularly the Black Belt in South Georgia.
So last week I drove about 2 1/2 hours south of Atlanta to a little town called Cordele, where local Democrats say they can't restock yard signs fast enough. And they were setting up tables and chairs for a debate watch party that drew dozens of people from several nearby counties.
ISAAC OWENS: I would like to think that Joe Biden won because of the city of Cordele and those votes.
FOWLER: Isaac Owens is a local pastor and city commissioner in Cordele, known as the watermelon capital of the world, and home to about half of the 20,000 people that live in Crisp County. He says that, a lot of times, candidates overlook rural communities.
OWENS: Because, oh, that's small. That's insignificant. But what happens when a group of small, a group of insignificant come together? They're no longer small and insignificant. They make a powerful thing.
FOWLER: Trump won about 65% of the vote in Crisp County the last two presidential election cycles. And Biden barely won the precinct that encompasses Cordele. So many eyebrows were raised when Democrats opened a campaign headquarters there, one of many offices they set up in places where there aren't a lot of voters, let alone ones that seem like they might vote for a Democrat.
BELIZIA GRANT: We also have the same needs and wants as the - Atlanta and the suburbs and the big cities.
FOWLER: Sixty-eight-year-old Belizia Grant (ph) said that these rural offices and a recent bus tour that the vice president took from Savannah go a long way towards showing would-be Democratic voters and rural communities that they have a voice.
GRANT: We feel seen. You want to not be taken for granted. And I feel like we're not being taken for granted in these small towns now.
KELLY: Reporting there from Stephen Fowler, letting us hear it from a few of the Democrats investing in rural Georgia, attempting to cut into the margins of Republican-heavy areas. Stephen, tell us about the other side. What are you hearing from Republicans?
FOWLER: Well, Georgia is one of many of the battleground states where Trump's loss in 2020 led to Republican in fighting, the implosion of state parties and legal issues that eroded some of the Republican Party's standing with voters. The clearest path for Trump to win in Georgia right now is to bring back those moderate suburban voters that backed popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp and also Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock in the 2022 midterms.
These are voters that are more receptive to a conservative vision of the future but wary of Trump as its messenger. To get a sense of some of this uphill battle that Republicans face in Georgia, let me take you to a debate watch party held in the ballroom at Adventure Outdoors, which bills itself as the world's largest gun store in a strip mall just outside of Atlanta.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: How many of you think four more years of this is a nightmare disaster, we're going to lose our country? Are you going to get out and vote?
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: You going to come out and poll watch?
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right. We appreciate that.
FOWLER: The 500 people that ate barbecue and cheered and jeered the debate between Trump and Harris are not the ones that need to be convinced to vote in the presidential election, nor to vote for Trump. There are people like Lisa Barnhart of nearby Vinings, who say that what the economy is like now compared to when Trump was president is clearly enough of a difference maker for voters.
LISA BARNHART: People who are having to spend a hundred dollars every time they go to the grocery store, who drive to work that have to fill up their car, I think it comes down to your individual needs. And I think everybody's really struggling now.
FOWLER: For those who might need a little more convincing, the party has people like Georgia's insurance commissioner, John King. He's the first Hispanic statewide elected official, a former police chief and retired major general in the National Guard who says the Republican Party, especially in Georgia, is ripe to expand its tent by showing how the government can get out of the way of people's lives.
JOHN KING: And that's why people are flocking to this great state because we have nothing but chaos. And that's why we need a change in leadership in Washington, D.C., so we can bring the same kind of policies that work for our great state back to Washington.
FOWLER: But some Republicans worry that vision is frequently overshadowed by Trump and his biggest fans focusing too much on the past and not the future, like Cobb County GOP Chair Salleigh Grubbs' message during a break in the debate.
SALLEIGH GRUBBS: Do you believe - do you really believe that Joe Biden got 81 million votes?
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: No.
GRUBBS: Eighty-one million votes my ass.
FOWLER: The concern that election denialism is bad for the party is grounded in recent history, where some Republicans stayed home in crucial 2021 U.S. Senate runoffs, and others crossed the aisle to vote for Democrats.
KELLY: All right. So, Stephen Fowler, that's a taste of how things are starting to shape up here in Georgia. I mean, beyond those stories, beyond these voices, give us a quick rundown of what you are watching for in these next seven weeks for how this election's going to land here in Georgia.
FOWLER: Absolutely. The population of Georgia has exploded in recent years, thanks in part to Republican leadership attracting industries and workers that don't typically vote for Republicans. So in my 30-year lifetime living here in Georgia, the state has become younger, more diverse, and it's become more of a crucial swing state, which leads me to three important points I'm watching.
One, ad spending. The Harris campaign currently has the edge in reservations from now until the Election Day. Two, events. As you mentioned, both JD Vance and Tim Walz are campaigning here in the next 24 hours, with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump holding several major rallies here in recent weeks. And three, early voting, which starts mid-October. So that's when we're going to know how much the enthusiasm the campaigns are showing gets turned into actual ballots that are cast.
KELLY: That's NPR's Stephen Fowler here in Atlanta, helping us kick off our series We The Voters. NPR is out talking to voters in battleground states between now and Election Day. Thank you, Stephen.
FOWLER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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