The Biden campaign and some Democratic donors seem to be less willing to invest time and money in Georgia as polls show that likely GOP nominee former President Donald Trump has taken a commanding lead in the state.
đź‘€Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in Georgia 49% to 43%, according to the latest NYT/ Sienna College poll. #gapol https://t.co/vC9XD4SGn3 pic.twitter.com/h8uzFZY6vw
— Patricia Murphy (@MurphyAJC) November 6, 2023
The most recent 538 polls show Trump with at least a two-point lead over President Biden in every poll and as high as a nine-point lead in the most recent polling.
“Since 2020, Democratic strategists and activists have fixated on how to expand their gains in Georgia, once a Republican stronghold and now a true battleground,” reports the New York Times.
The article continues, “But some of the state’s most prominent grass-roots organizers — those responsible for engineering President Biden’s victory in 2020 and that of two Democratic U.S. senators in 2021 — are growing concerned that efforts and attention are waning four years later.”
Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020 was only by about 12,000 votes, but it was also key in allowing Democrats to gain control of the Senate. Biden’s first term, however, appears to be turning some of those voters off.
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution published the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Georgia voters at the beginning of November. That poll shows Trump leading Biden by six points at 49%-43%, a result that is outside of the poll’s margin of error and shows significant weakness among Democratic supporters.
In 2020, the Biden campaign was effective in promoting racial and social justice concerns like voting rights that encouraged record numbers of voters to the polls. Biden has failed to fulfill many of those campaign promises and there is a growing apathy from many of those voters to support him again.
Publicly, President Biden has indicated that winning Georgia remains an important part of his election strategy, but behind the scenes, there are fears that this is not the case.
According to PJ Media, “Small but potentially pivotal shifts in strategy — cost-conscious measures like delaying large-scale voter engagement programs to later in the cycle or relying more on volunteers than paid canvassers — have privately stoked fears among some organizers about their ability to replicate their successes.”
There are paths to victory for President Biden that do not include winning Georgia, but there are enough other battleground states that could be as difficult to win, if not more so, that retreating from Georgia this soon could be a mistake.
