(FROM SRN NEWS/REUTERS) – Vice President Kamala Harris makes her first trip to Georgia as a presidential candidate Tuesday night with some of the state’s Democrats expressing new optimism that their party’s candidate can carry the state in November.
With less than 100 days left in one of the least predictable campaign seasons in recent history, Democrats are polling voters in swing states anew and redrawing their map to victory. Some Democrats now see Georgia, which Democrats barely won in a hard-fought battle in 2020, as a possible victory again in 2024.
Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff said on MSNBC over the weekend that Harris’ entry into the race “has put Georgia in play” for Democrats and predicted she will win.
Swing states like Georgia are fiercely contested because they can lean either to Republicans or Democrats and play a decisive role in presidential elections.
FiveThirtyEight, the poll aggregation site, shows Republican Donald Trump leading Harris by between one and five percentage points in surveys taken after Harris became the likely Democratic candidate.
President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid on July 22 and endorsed Harris for the Nov. 5 vote against Trump. Since then, Harris’s election campaign has raised $200 million, signed up 170,000 new volunteers and she has significantly outperformed Biden in recent polling among young people, Black voters and Hispanic voters.
A New York Times/Siena College national poll published Thursday found Harris has narrowed a sizable Trump lead; Trump had a two percentage point lead in a Wall Street Journal poll published on Friday. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published July 23 showed a two point lead for Harris.
Biden’s campaign saw a narrowing path to victory with the “Sun Belt states,” including Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, unlikely wins. Georgia backed Biden by 0.2 percentage points, just under 12,000 votes in 2020, and Trump by around 5 percentage points in 2016.