Atlanta<\/a>, said he voted for Trump recently at C.T. Martin Recreation Center in Atlanta. He said his top concerns this election are immigration and the economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMoore said he thinks his generation\u2019s access to the internet \u2013 and the ability to more easily see how others are faring in comparison \u2013 has led to Black men rethinking their historical allegiance to the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo I think people are just looking for change, whether or not Trump brings that, I think is irrelevant, but it\u2019s going to put pressure on the Democrats to construct a better policy to approach Black men on the next cycle,\u201d Moore said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back at Morehouse, Jackson said how the students in the march voted was beside the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou might not agree with a candidate on 100% of things. That\u2019s just politics. You\u2019re not going to,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cBut your vote matters. Your voice matters. Your understanding of different issues matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cSo, my advice to everybody would be, even if you feel like you don\u2019t agree 100%, still make your voice heard. Make your vote heard.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A fight to the finish<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Friday marked the end of three weeks of early voting in Georgia and set the state up to potentially etch a new highwater mark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just over 4 million of Georgia\u2019s 7.2 million active voters had already cast a ballot ahead of the election, representing more than 55% turnout, according to the secretary of state\u2019s office. That includes 3.7 million who voted early in person and more than 240,000 who voted by mail. This year\u2019s numbers dwarf the nearly 2.7 million who voted early in 2020 during the pandemic when absentee voting spiked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If just 1 million Georgians cast a ballot on Election Day, the state will beat its 2020 total turnout record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As of Saturday, 92 of Georgia\u2019s 159 counties have surpassed 50% turnout. The counties with the highest percentage of turnout are rural and tend to support Republicans, including Towns, Oconee and Dawson counties, but some heavily populated metro counties that give more votes to Democrats are also exceeding the state average, including Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even though some voters just opted to cast their ballot before Tuesday\u2019s big day, political observers say they expect the final tally to surpass the record turnout seen in 2020 when nearly 5 million Georgians voted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both candidates and their surrogates were in Georgia over the weekend to make their final appeals to last-minute voters after months of campaigning in one of the seven battleground states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And while the early voting numbers do not reveal which presidential candidate is leading, they do offer some clues. At a time when Trump maintains a slight edge over Harris in the polls, there are still positive signs for both sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Voter turnout among Georgia women has been strong, representing about 56% of the electorate at a time when Harris is doing well with women in polling. But at the same time, rural Trump-friendly counties \u2013 like Towns County in ruby red northeast Georgia \u2013 are punching above their weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe big question is, we see a lot more enthusiasm with Republicans coming out, but is it kind of just like rearranging the furniture in your living room? You\u2019re not adding anything new, you\u2019re just changing where things are?\u201d said Kennesaw State University political science professor and former Cobb County GOP chairman Jason Shepherd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe won\u2019t know until after Election Day really how many new voters Republicans have or if they\u2019re able to have been able to increase their margins.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, Shepherd said he thinks signs are good for the former president. He said he expects Trump to win Georgia this time after narrowly losing by less than 12,000 votes four years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shepherd said early voting in Georgia has only been around for about 16 years. For a while, there was a generational split in the party on early voting, but he said the current generation of Georgia Republicans is more comfortable casting their ballots ahead of Election Day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And after discouraging his supporters from voting early in 2020, Trump often urged them to bank their ballots as soon as they could this time. At a rally in Duluth last month, signs directed his supporters to \u201cgo vote now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile Democrats were very quick to embrace it much more so than Republicans, Republicans have kind of caught up, and this has just taken time,\u201d Shepherd said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, agreed that there are signs of trouble for Harris going into the final day of voting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most glaring issue: Black voters represent about 26% of those who have voted so far.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor a Democrat to win in Georgia, that number needs to be up around at least 28, better even at 30,\u201d Bullock said midday Friday while the polls were still open for early voting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAnd then also, a Democrat needs to run really well among that turnout, and the polling indicates she\u2019s not doing that either,\u201d he added, adding that Biden received 88% percent of Black support with 29% turnout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The upside, though, is Harris appears to have the share of the white voter support she needs, which is about 30%, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the final set of polls<\/a> from The New York Times and Siena College released Sunday indicate that Harris may have made up ground with Black voters, with her registering 87% support among them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat I\u2019m going to be looking at Tuesday night is is she running up the kind of numbers she needs to get in metro Atlanta, and if she didn\u2019t, then she\u2019s not going to make it up anyplace else,\u201d Bullock said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turnout in the core metro Atlanta counties \u2013 Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett \u2013 often makes up half the votes for Democrats, Bullock said. Biden came out of those five counties with a lead of over 700,000 votes, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Vastly unfair\u2019<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
In all the talk about percentages, something has been lost, says Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for New Georgia Project, which is a nonpartisan voting rights group focused on empowering the state\u2019s Black and brown communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In terms of sheer numbers, Black voter turnout was tracking ahead of 2020 last week, she said. On Friday, more than 1 million Black voters had cast a ballot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a little bit of a narrative out there right now about Black turnout being lower, and that\u2019s just not the case,\u201d Ali said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The difference, she said, is that other groups \u2013 like white voters \u2013 are turning out at slightly higher rates and so are representing a larger slice of the overall pie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all in how people talk about it that can be very discouraging to voters. \u2018Well, no one\u2019s turning out, no one\u2019s coming out for it.\u2019 But that\u2019s just not true,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s almost setting up a narrative of if the Democratic party loses, here\u2019s who we get to blame. And that is vastly unfair,\u201d she also said. \u201cAnd it happens almost every year in almost any given state that there is some sort of targeting of a voter group, whomever it may be to say, this is why X person didn\u2019t win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Rollin Jackson Jr. and other students at Morehouse College heard that turnout had been light at Flipper Temple AME Church, they quickly hatched a plan to march as a group to the polling place. A group of nearly 100 students \u2013 many of them first-time voters \u2013 gathered on the penultimate day of early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":202481,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15957],"tags":[9413,8526,8514,9043,9011,11577],"class_list":["post-209220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-your-vote","tag-absentee-voting","tag-donald-trump","tag-election","tag-election-day","tag-kamala-harris","tag-voter-turnout","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}