Trump won 11 percent of the state’s black vote in 2020, but he’s polling better in 2024. Conversations with Harris backers reveal a lack of spark.
ATLANTA—On Oct. 19, Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally just south of Atlanta. Thousands turned out for the event, including many black voters from the area—voters crucial to Harris’s aspirations to hold onto the Peach State.
In 2020, candidate Joe Biden won Georgia by a paper-thin 0.23-point margin, or just over 11,000 votes.
The narrow victory was something of an upset in a state that had voted for Republicans in every presidential contest since 1992.
Biden’s slim 2020 victory was due in large part to high black voter turnout in Fulton, DeKalb, and Clayton counties, located in and around the city center of Atlanta, boosted by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s voter turnout machine.
Black voters make up nearly one-third of Georgia’s electorate. In Atlanta, one of the largest cities in the South, they make up around 47.1 percent.
According to exit polling, Biden won the lion’s share of these voters, taking in 88 percent of Georgia’s black vote to President Donald Trump’s 11 percent.
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But this year, polling and voter sentiment raise red flags for Harris’s