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Georgia is hosting the 1st presidential debate. Its voters could decide the election
A stack of stickers sits atop a ballot scanner during the midterm elections on Nov. 8, 2022, in Tucker, Georgia. In 2024, Georgia is poised to play a pivotal role in the outcome of the presidential election.
Ben Gray/FR171789 AP
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Ben Gray/FR171789 AP
Just under 12,000 votes separated Joe Biden and Donald Trump when they last appeared on the ballot in Georgia. Four years later, the rivals are preparing to share a debate stage this week in Atlanta as they fight for the slice of Georgia voters who could swing the presidential election.
Some of those voters with outsize influence live in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta where new subdivisions keep sprouting and have helped turn this formerly Republican stronghold purple. Reading a novel on a lounge chair in the sun at Alpharetta’s Wills Park Pool, Kerry Webster is the kind of voter Biden and Trump need to persuade.
Webster says she is unhappy with her choices for president. And though she voted for Trump in 2020, he has since been convicted on 34 felony counts and faces more charges, including in Georgia.
A grand jury indicted Trump just a few miles from the debate stage on charges that he attempted to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election result.
“He’s a conniver. He’s not really a good person — he’s really not,” Webster said. “But the economy was better, and Biden, I don’t know if he does a lot for us, hate to say.”
But Webster does not plan to watch Thursday’s debate. Despite living in a state and a suburban community that helped decide the presidency in 2020, she says she feels unmotivated about her options and has wondered whether her vote matters much anyway.
The Wills Park Pool in Alpharetta, Ga., has given families a break from the heat, but with the presidential debate in Georgia on Thursday, voters can’t get a break from politics in this pivotal state.
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Prasad and Mansi Vichare are keeping an eye on their kids splashing nearby as a DJ bumps Taylor Swift on repeat and older kids leap from a tall diving board for prizes. The Vichares identify as political independents. And though they definitely plan to vote, they think debates are a mostly useless exercise.
“To be honest, they’re a waste, but that’s just my opinion,” Prasad said. “I’m indifferent,” added Mansi, who believes the candidates just tell people what they think they want to hear. “I feel like it’s somewhat fake, and so I don’t know if it’s really that helpful.”
A few lounge chairs away, Madalyn Ford is concerned that some voters have not internalized the stakes.
Ford says she has voted for both Republicans and Democrats, but never Trump. At 73, she worries about the U.S. that her grandkids will inherit and says she will not miss the debate.
“This is really important for Biden,” Ford predicted. “He better get a good night’s rest. I don’t think he’s got dementia, but he’s old and this is super-important.”
Polls suggest that Biden has gained ground with older voters, particularly women. But support from younger voters of color, who have long been Democrats’ bread and butter, appears to be softening.
Millennial Deanna McKay says she has struggled with whether her vote matters. McKay voted for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. She says she will watch this debate with an open mind.
“Socially Biden, but financially Trump, and that’s kind of a tough place to be,” she explained. “But it’s a little frustrating because these aren’t the two candidates I would choose.”
McKay says she cares most about affordable housing and reproductive rights. She says she does not directly fault Trump for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, despite his three appointments that cemented a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
Field operations take shape as voting nears
This month, the Trump campaign opened its first Georgia field office in a tidy brick building that’s 20 miles south of Atlanta and shared with an insurance agency. On a recent weekday, staffers invited supporters to tour the campaign’s inaugural field office, grab coffee and doughnuts and sign up to volunteer.
Ben Carson, who was the U.S. secretary of housing and urban development during Donald Trump’s administration, speaks at a ceremony to open the Republican presidential candidate’s first Georgia campaign office, in Fayetteville, on June 13.
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Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development under Trump, traveled to Georgia for the grand opening and described the choice that voters face in November with an analogy.
“Would you rather have the surgeon who has a bad bedside manner but saves everybody, or the one with a very sweet personality who kills everybody?” Carson asked. “Which one would you take?”
The Trump campaign says it now has more than a dozen staffed field offices in the state, though Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, recently raised concerns that the Trump campaign’s ground game in Georgia may be lagging.
“This year it will be clearer than ever that Georgians are ready to help send their state’s sixteen electoral votes to the GOP column this fall,” Henry Scavone, the Republican National Committee’s communications director in Georgia, said in a statement.
After Biden managed to flip Georgia blue in 2020, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1992, Republicans swept nearly every statewide office in the midterm elections that followed. Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock won reelection that year in a runoff, the one exception.
Democrats still believe Georgia is winnable and see a strong ground game as crucial to notching more wins. Ahead of the debate, the Biden campaign says it will hold 200 events in Georgia, looking to leverage the national spotlight and the side-by-side view of the two candidates.
Jonae Wartel, the Biden campaign’s senior adviser in Georgia, says deploying a presence statewide, not just in the Democratic stronghold of metro Atlanta, is a key feature of the campaign’s Georgia strategy. The campaign says it has 14 Georgia field offices and will hit 100 staffers here by the end of the week.
“Right here in our backyard, the world is going to be watching how President Biden is fit to lead us into another four-year administration and Donald Trump is continuing to be a threat,” Wartel says. “That contrast is going to be on full display. It’s the campaign’s job to take advantage of that.”
“I’m very nervous, I’ll be honest”
The Biden campaign opened an Atlanta campaign office with a Juneteenth block party joined by Vice President Harris.
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Vice President Harris has traveled to Georgia so often that she says people have started jokingly asking whether she is moving there.
“I said maybe!” she recently joked during a Juneteenth block party to celebrate the opening of a coordinated campaign office in Atlanta.
“We’re never going to let anybody take our power from us — we will never let anybody silence us. That’s what this election is about,” Harris told members of the crowd as they enjoyed barbecue and snow cones. “The people of Georgia are going to make the decision, and the decision will be four more years.”
Val Acree attends a Juneteenth block party with Vice President Harris and says she’s excited to vote for Harris and President Biden again in 2024.
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Voter Val Acree said she is unabashedly supporting Biden and Harris. Even so, she does have some trepidation about the next few months.
“I’m very nervous, I’ll be honest,” Acree said. “There’s a lot of disinformation and disengagement out there, so I’m doing everything on my part that I can to get people engaged.”
That’s why Acree says she will be watching when Biden and Trump meet on the debate stage just a few miles away.
The Supreme Court
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The Supreme Court on Monday intervened in New York’s redistricting process, blocking a lower court decision that would likely have flipped a Republican congressional district into a Democratic district.
At issue is the midterm redrawing of New York’s 11th congressional district, including Staten Island and a small part of Brooklyn. The district is currently held by a Republican, but on Jan. 21, a state Supreme Court judge ruled that the current district dilutes the power of Black and Latino voters in violation of the state constitution.
GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who represents the district, and the Republican co-chair of the state Board of Elections promptly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to block the redrawing as an unconstitutional “racial gerrymander.” New York’s congressional election cycle was set to officially begin Feb. 24, the opening day for candidates to seek placement on the ballot.
As in this year’s prior mid-decade redistricting fights — in Texas and California — the Trump administration backed the Republicans.
Voters and the State of New York contended it’s too soon for the Supreme Court to wade into this dispute. New York’s highest state court has not issued a final judgment, so the voters asserted that if the Supreme Court grants relief now “future stay applicants will see little purpose in waiting for state court rulings before coming to this Court” and “be rewarded for such gamesmanship.” The state argues this is an issue for “New York courts, not federal courts” to resolve, and there is sufficient time for the dispute to be resolved on the merits.
The court majority explained the decision to intervene in 101 words, which the three dissenting liberal justices summarized as “Rules for thee, but not for me.”
The unsigned majority order does not explain the Court’s rationale. It says only how long the stay will last, until the case moves through the New York State appeals courts. If, however, the losing party petitions and the court agrees to hear the challenge, the stay extends until the final opinion is announced.
Dissenting from the decision were Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Writing for the three, Sotomayor said that if nonfinal decisions of a state trial court can be brought to highest court, “then every decision from any court is now fair game.” More immediately, she noted, “By granting these applications, the Court thrusts itself into the middle of every election-law dispute around the country, even as many States redraw their congressional maps ahead of the 2026 election.”
Monday’s Supreme Court action deviates from the court’s hands-off pattern in these mid-term redistricting fights this year. In two previous cases — from Texas and California — the court refused to intervene, allowing newly drawn maps to stay in effect.
Requests for Supreme Court intervention on redistricting issues has been a recurring theme this term, a trend that is likely to grow. Earlier last month the high court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map. California’s redistricting came in response to a GOP-friendly redistricting plan in Texas that the Supreme Court also permitted to move forward. These redistricting efforts are expected to offset one another.
But the high court itself has yet to rule on a challenge to Louisiana’s voting map, which was drawn by the state legislature after the decennial census in order to create a second majority-Black district. Since the drawing of that second majority-black district, the state has backed away from that map, hoping to return to a plan that provides for only one majority-minority district.
The Supreme Court’s consideration of the Louisiana case has stretched across two terms. The justices failed to resolve the case last term and chose to order a second round of arguments this term adding a new question: Does the state’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority district violate the constitution’s Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments’ guarantee of the right to vote and the authority of Congress to enforce that mandate?
Following the addition of the new question, the state of Louisiana flipped positions to oppose the map it had just drawn and defended in court. Whether the Supreme Court follows suit remains to be seen. But the tone of the October argument suggested that the court’s conservative supermajority is likely to continue undercutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Note: Map shows the area with a shake intensity of 3 or greater, which U.S.G.S. defines as “weak,” though the earthquake may be felt outside the areas shown. The New York Times
A minor earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 3.5 struck in Central California on Monday, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The temblor happened at 7:17 a.m. Pacific time about 6 miles northwest of Pinnacles, Calif., data from the agency shows.
As seismologists review available data, they may revise the earthquake’s reported magnitude. Additional information collected about the earthquake may also prompt U.S.G.S. scientists to update the shake-severity map.
Source: United States Geological Survey | Notes: Shaking categories are based on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale. When aftershock data is available, the corresponding maps and charts include earthquakes within 100 miles and seven days of the initial quake. All times above are Pacific time. Shake data is as of Monday, March 2 at 10:20 a.m. Eastern. Aftershocks data is as of Monday, March 2 at 11:18 a.m. Eastern.
The U.S. and Israel have been conducting strikes against targets in Iran since Saturday morning, with the aim of toppling Tehran’s clerical regime. Iran has fired back, with retaliatory assaults featuring missiles and drones targeting several Gulf countries and American bases in the Middle East.
“All six aircrew ejected safely, have been safely recovered, and are in stable condition. Kuwait has acknowledged this incident, and we are grateful for the efforts of the Kuwaiti defense forces and their support in this ongoing operation,” Central Command said.
“The cause of the incident is under investigation. Additional information will be released as it becomes available,” it added.
In a separate statement later Monday, Central Command said that American forces had been killed during combat since the strikes began.
“As of 7:30 am ET, March 2, four U.S. service members have been killed in action. The fourth service member, who was seriously wounded during Iran’s initial attacks, eventually succumbed to their injuries,” it said.
Major combat operations continue and our response effort is ongoing. The identities of the fallen are being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification,” Central Command added.
This story has been updated.
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