According to a Friday report from The Hill , Democrats believe that the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden , could turn the state of Georgia blue in November.
In 2016, President Donald Trump won Georgia by around five points, receiving 200,000 more votes than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The president’s campaign is reportedly spending money to defend the state, but Biden’s team apparently sees the race as competitive and plans on investing funds as well.
According to data from former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s group Fair Fight, more than 750,000 Georgians who were not eligible to vote in the 2018 midterms are now registered, and most of them are young people and people of color.
The organization’s data also shows that more than 1.2 million Georgia Democrats voted in the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries earlier this year, outvoting their Republican counterparts by large margins.
“[Republicans are] seeing the same registration, turnout and polling numbers that we are, and they’re scared for good reason. The math and demographics are on Democrats’ side, and we have two pick-up opportunities for U.S. Senate seats as well,” Fair Fight spokesman Seth Bringman explained.
Echoing Bringman, former chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, DuBose Porter, said that the state is “very much in play.”
According to Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Atlanta’s Emory University, the Republican Party’s popularity in Georgia has decreased amid the coronavirus pandemic, largely thanks to Gov. Brian Kemp.
Kemp’s decision to reopen the state early on appears to have contributed to the uptick in COVID-19 cases in the state.
“I think it is more likely than ever that Georgia will vote for a Democrat for president for the first time since 1992. Not certain, but more likely,” Abramowitz said.
However, some Republicans remain skeptical.
Seth Weathers, who was the president’s Georgia campaign director in 2016, conceded that some parts of Georgia might turn blue in the future, but noted that he does not believe the Democratic Party can win the state this November.
“I’ve worked here for a decade and a half and every two years we hear about how Georgia is turning blue. It hasn’t happened,” Weathers said.
As The Hill noted, there are concerning signs for Trump and the GOP. A recent Fox News poll put Biden two percentage points ahead of Trump in Georgia, also showing that 51 percent of voters in the state disapprove of the president’s performance in the White House.
According to a CNBC /Change Research poll released earlier this week, Trump has also lost ground in Arizona, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
