The summer dead period is here but things will not be slowing down for Georgia on the recruiting trail. The Dawgs are making moves for elite targets, including a flip candidate from another SEC program. Get the latest on UGA’s pursuit of some of the top players in the 2025 class right here.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. (AP) — President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will meet for their first general election debate Thursday in Georgia, the battleground that yielded the closest 2020 margin of any state and became the epicenter of Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s election.

Now, in their rematch, Georgia will test which man can best assemble a winning coalition despite their respective weaknesses. Each must persuade grumpy voters in places like Fayette County, a suburb south of Atlanta, that they’re less frightening than the alternative.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the third consecutive time, has been convicted of felony crimes and awaits sentencing and three more criminal trials, including in Atlanta. That legal peril could exacerbate his struggles with moderate Republicans and independents, some of whom abandoned him as he helped dismantle the constitutional right to an abortion and refused to accept defeat in 2020.

Biden, the Democratic incumbent, has presided over an inflationary economy, struggled with a Middle East war that divides Democrats, and failed to resolve immigration problems along the southern U.S. border. He faces potential defections from nonwhite and younger voters.

One of Georgia’s richest counties, Fayette has long housed retirees and Delta Air Lines workers seeking homes near Atlanta’s airport. Now it’s also a bastion of Georgia’s state-subsidizedmovie industry. At the Trillith development, a rapidly growing high-end town and movie studio, workers can be overheard discussing the latest Captain America movie being filmed there.

Like other Atlanta suburbs, the 120,000-resident county has been angling left. Democrats haven’t yet deposed Fayette’s Republican majority, but they got close in December 2022, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock won 49.5% of Fayette’s votes in defeating Republican Herschel Walker.

“We do believe that the pathway to the presidency comes right through Fayette County this year,” said Joe Clark, chair of the Fayette County Democratic Party and a Fayetteville City Council member.

The Trump campaign on June 13 opened its first Georgia campaign office in Fayetteville.

“They want to try to flip our county,” warned Brian Jack, a former Trump aide who recently clinched the GOP nomination for a Republican-leaning congressional seat.

Statewide, Republicans say Georgia still tilts toward them. Yes, Democrats won statewide four times in Georgia, starting with Biden in 2020, continuing as Jon Ossoff and Warnock swept to twin victories in a 2021 runoff that clinched Democratic control of the U.S. Senate, and culminating in Warnock’s reelection in 2022. But GOP Gov. Brian Kemp won a second term as governor in 2022 over Democrat Stacy Abrams by a comfortable margin, sweeping down-ballot offices along the way.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ top strategist, said Democrats were slow to engage in Georgia in 2020. Both sides have been spending heavily this year.

“This is the first time since the 1990s that Georgia has been a top-tier battleground state for the presidential on both sides of the aisle, from the beginning of both campaigns,” Groh-Wargo said.

Both sides have work to do. Many voters, Democrats and Republicans, say they’re dispirited by the Trump-Biden rematch. Some say they’re not sure that they will even vote.

Robert Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid is another wildcard. Kennedy hasn’t been certified for the ballot, but he could make Georgia even harder to predict.

Some formerly solid Republicans have taken to splitting their tickets. Trump and Walker showed weakness in metro Atlanta even as Kemp remained strong.

Quentin Fulks, a southwest Georgia native who is Biden’s principal deputy campaign manager and steered Warnock’s 2022 campaign, estimates that Warnock won 9% of Republican voters.

“Candidate quality matters,” said Republican strategist Brian Robinson. Trump ignited “a real realignment” that drew working-class voters without college degrees toward Republicans, Robinson said, but has pushed away college-educated voters.

Some of those voters “still want to vote for Republicans or are willing to,” but only in the right circumstances. In Georgia’s Republican presidential primary in March, about 78,000 voters — most in metro Atlanta — voted for Nikki Haley over Trump even after Haley suspended her campaign. Haley’s total was more than six times Biden’s 2020 Georgia victory margin.

Fayette ranks seventh among Georgia’s 159 counties in voters who backed Kemp but not Walker. Haley won 13.2% statewide, but nearly 19% in Fayette County.

Rhonda Quillian, shopping at a Peachtree City farmer’s market, backed Haley. She says neither Biden nor Trump feel like an option for her. She’s considering not voting at all.

Quillian said she liked Trump’s policies after she voted for him in 2016, but soured on him, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

“If he wasn’t such an egomaniac, I would vote for him in a skinny minute because of the policies,” Quillian said. “But he’s a little scary when he starts talking and he’s trying to overthrow the election and being anti-Constitution and, you know, ‘I’m the law.’ I’m sorry, no, this is a democratic republic.”

For Biden, the challenge is replicating the coalition that delivered his razor-thin margin. Responding to warnings from Georgia Democrats that he must engage with Black voters, the president has visited routinely, and Vice President Kamala Harris has made five trips to Georgia this year.

“We have to talk to Black voters in both urban and rural Georgia,” Fulks said. “That is where I start.”

Trump has boasted that he will make inroads among Black voters. Robinson acknowledged it’s unlikely Trump would get even a fifth of Black voters, but said he wouldn’t necessarily have to: Black voters typically account for about 30% of Georgia ballots. If some Black voters stay home, or Biden’s share drops even a little, Trump could benefit.

Deidra Ellington, a counselor who lives in Fayetteville, calls the choice between Biden and Trump “slim pickings.” Ellington, who is Black, says she no longer feels allegiance to either party.

“It’s almost to a point where you’re not even able to live paycheck to paycheck,” Ellington said. “You get the first paycheck, and then it’s borrowing in between before the next paycheck.”

In an April poll by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, more Democrats said Biden had hurt than helped on the cost of living and immigration. The Biden campaign has been trying to salve that pain.

“The president deeply understands what Americans are going through, and also the fact that there is more work to do,” Fulks said.

Republicans, meanwhile, aim to turn the election into a referendum on Biden’s handling of the economy.

“My pitch is, are you happy with $4 a gallon gas and $6 for a jar of mayonnaise? If you’re not, it was not like that when Trump was in office,” said Suzanne Brown, a Peachtree City Council member who has canvassed for Republicans this spring.

Democrats say they’re out-organizing Trump, aiming to turn out marginal Democrats and persuade independents and moderate Republicans to back Biden. The campaign has a dozen offices and 75 staffers statewide, including some in Fayetteville.

“I think that Trump is underestimating the power of organizing,” Fulks said.

Not so, says Republican National Committee spokesperson Henry Scavone. He says the Trump campaign has gone from zero offices to a dozen since June 13.

Republicans, aware voters are in a sour mood, are optimistic but not cocky about places like Fayette County.

“If the election were held today, Donald Trump would almost certainly win here,” Robinson said. “But the election isn’t being held today.”

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Barrow reported from Atlanta.

Tucked inside the West Virginia Statehouse is a copy of a petition to lawmakers with a simple request: Let the voters decide whether to reinstate legal access to abortion.

The request has been ignored by the Republican lawmakers who have supermajority control in the Legislature and banned abortions in the state in 2022, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a constitutional right to the procedure.

The petition, with more than 2,500 signatures, is essentially meaningless given the current makeup of the Legislature. But it illustrates the frustratingly limited options millions of Americans face in trying to re-establish abortion rights as the country marks the two-year anniversary since the Supreme Court’s ruling.

West Virginia is among the 25 states that do not allow citizen initiatives or constitutional amendments on a statewide ballot, an avenue of direct democracy that has allowed voters to circumvent their legislatures and preserve abortion and other reproductive rights in a number of states over the past two years.

Republicans there have repeatedly dismissed the idea of placing an abortion-rights measure before voters, which in West Virginia is a step only lawmakers can take.

“It makes you wonder what they’re so afraid of,” said Democratic Del. Kayla Young, one of only 16 women in the West Virginia Legislature. “If they feel so strongly that this is what people believe, prove it.”

The court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade was praised by abortion opponents as a decision that returned the question to the states. Former President Donald Trump, who named three of the justices who overturned Roe, has repeatedly claimed “the people” are now the ones deciding abortion access.

“The people are deciding,” he said during a recent interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. “And in many ways, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.”

But that’s not true everywhere. In states allowing the citizen initiative and where abortion access has been on the ballot, voters have resoundingly affirmed the right to abortion.

Voters in seven states, including conservative ones such as Kentucky, Montana and Ohio, have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to curtail them in statewide votes over the past two years. Reproductive rights supporters are trying to put citizen initiatives on the ballot in several states this year.

But voters don’t have a direct say in about half the states.

This is particularly true for those living in the South. Republican-controlled legislatures, many of which have been heavily gerrymandered to give the GOP disproportionate power, have enacted some of the strictest abortion bans since the Supreme Court ruling while shunning efforts to expand direct democracy.

States began adopting the initiative process during the Progressive Era more than a century ago, giving citizens a way to make or repeal laws through a direct vote of the people. Between 1898 and 1918, nearly 20 states approved the citizen initiative. Since then, just five states have done so.

“It was a different time,” said John Matsusaka, professor of business and law at the University of Southern California. “There was a political movement across the whole country when people were trying to do what they saw as good government.”

Some lawmakers argue citizen initiatives bypass important checks and balances offered through the legislative process. In Tennessee, where Republicans have gerrymandered legislative districts to give them a supermajority in the statehouse, House Majority Leader William Lamberth likened ballot measures to polls rather than what he described as the legislature’s strict review of complicated policy-making.

“We evaluate bills every single year,” he said.

As in West Virginia, abortion-rights supporters or Democratic lawmakers have asked Republican-controlled legislatures in a handful of states to take the abortion question straight to voters, a tactic that hasn’t succeeded anywhere the GOP has a majority.

“This means you’re going to say, ‘Hey Legislature, would you like to give up some of your power? Would you like to give up your monopoly on policymaking?’” said Thad Kousser, professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. “You need a political momentum and then have the process cooperate.”

In South Carolina, which bans nearly all abortions, a Democratic-backed resolution to put a state constitutional amendment on the ballot never got a hearing this year. Attempts to attach the proposal to other pieces of legislation were quickly shut down by Republicans.

“If you believe you are doing the right thing for all the people of South Carolina — men and women and babies — you should have no problem putting this to the people,” said Democratic Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, alleging that Republicans fear they would lose if the issue went directly to voters.

In Georgia, Democratic Rep. Shea Roberts said she frequently fields questions from her constituents asking how they can get involved in a citizen-led ballot measure. The interest exploded after voters in Kansas rejected an anti-abortion measure from the Legislature in 2022 and was rekindled last fall after Ohio voters overwhelmingly passed an amendment codifying abortion rights in the state’s constitution.

Yet when she has brought legislation to create a citizen initiative process in Georgia, the efforts have been ignored inside the Republican-controlled Legislature.

“Voters are constantly asking us why we can’t do this, and we’re constantly explaining that it’s not possible under our current constitution,” Roberts said. “If almost half of states have this process, why shouldn’t Georgians?”

The contrast is on stark display in two presidential swing states. Michigan voters used a citizen initiative to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution in 2022. Voters in neighboring Wisconsin don’t have that ability.

Instead, Wisconsin Democrats, with a new liberal majority on the state Supreme Court, are working to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps that are among the most gerrymandered in the country in the hope of eventually flipping the Legislature.

Analiese Eicher, director of communications at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Wisconsin, said a citizen-led ballot measure process would have been especially valuable for her cause.

“We should have legislators who represent their constituents,” she said. “And if they don’t, there should be another option.”

In West Virginia, Steve Williams acknowledges the petition he spearheaded didn’t change minds inside the Legislature.

But the Democratic mayor of Huntington, who is a longshot candidate for governor, said he thinks state Republicans have underestimated how strongly voters believe in restoring some kind of abortion access.

Republican leadership has pointed to a 2018 vote in which just under 52% of voters supported a constitutional amendment saying there is no right to abortion access in the state. But Williams said the vote also had to do with state funding of abortion, which someone could oppose without wanting access completely eliminated.

The vote was close, voter participation was low and it came before the Supreme Court’s decision that eliminated a nationwide right to abortion. Williams said West Virginia women weren’t facing the reality of a near-total ban.

“Let’s face it: Life in 2024 is a heck of a lot different for women than it was in 2018,” he said.

Associated Press writer Jeffrey Collins contributed to this report from Columbia, South Carolina. Kruesi reported from Nashville, Tennessee, and Fernando from Chicago.

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