Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris know if they want to win Georgia, they need to secure the Black vote. Black people make up Georgia’s largest minority voting bloc, representing roughly 30% of all registered voters in the swing state.

Black men played a critical role in electing President Joe Biden. A total of 83% of Black men in Georgia cast a ballot for Biden in 2020, the Washington Post reported. Now, a week before the 2024 election, the candidates are crisscrossing the state to reach Black men, with Harris working to maintain Democrats’ traditional edge among the demographic.

Over 77% of Black Georgians plan to vote for Harris, according to a recent poll from the Atlanta Journal Constitution. That’s a jump from the 70% who were backing Biden when asked in June, but still far less than the 90% of votes Biden received from Black Georgians in the 2020 election.  

There have been rumblings for months among some pollsters that Black men might be leaving the Democratic party, instead choosing to throw their support behind Trump.

Despite what some polls are saying, John Taylor believes “the reality is very different.”

Taylor is the co-founder of the Black Male Initiative Georgia, a nonprofit that focuses on getting Black men civically engaged in the Peach State. Through door-to-door canvassing and events, his group has had over 195,000 conversations with Black men during this election cycle. The vast majority — roughly 83% — voiced their support for Harris.

“I don’t believe that we’re more inclined to vote for Trump,” Taylor says. “I think it’s an atrocious, racist trope to think that because Trump has 34 charges, or his misogynistic behavior, that it in some way endears him to Black men. That’s not who we are.”USA TODAY spoke with Black men on the ground in Georgia to see where they stood on the matchup between Harris and Trump.

A house divided

Josh Gossett, a 33-year-old small business owner in Atlanta, has seen this dynamic play out in his own family. Gossett voted early for Harris. His younger brother Aaron will be casting a ballot for Trump this year.

He believes his brother was eventually won over by Trump’s antagonistic attitude.

“It isn’t about the policies,” Gossett tells USA TODAY. “For people like my brother, it really is about opposition to the mainstream. They see Trump as an avatar for all their anger and frustrations that they’ve had with the system.”

Gossett feels that system has often “left behind” Black men like him and his brother, leaving them “underpaid and underemployed” in the modern workforce. Those disparities in employment and financial opportunity then translate to frustrations at the ballot box.

That’s when a politician like Trump enters, fueling economic insecurities with anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“If any group of people is vulnerable to the idea that immigrants are ‘stealing’ their jobs, it’s Black men,” Gossett says.

‘Racism got real bad under Trump’

Robert James is a 67-year-old rideshare driver who lives in a suburb of Atlanta. While driving, he’s inundated with constant reminders of the presidential election—on the radio, interstate billboards, and customers eager to chat about politics. Like many Americans, he’s excited for the election to be over.

“I’m tired of seeing the commercials,” he sighs.

But campaign ads aside, James knows this election is important—particularly for Black men. He fears that racism would escalate under a second Trump presidency.

“After Trump was elected, it reminded me of the days after Sept.11th,” James says. “Racism got real bad under Trump, after he first got in there. It gave people permission to be racist.”

Like the rise in hate crimes faced by Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans following the 2001 terrorist attacks, violence against Black Americans skyrocketed in the wake of Trump’s election.

According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 187 hate incidents committed against Black people in the first 10 days following the 2016 election. Some of these amounted to hate crimes.

It is facts like this that make it even more disheartening for James to see fellow Black men support Trump. “My question for them is: why? Why do you continue to back this man? You see how he is.”

Harris’ plans for Black men

Thousands of people gathered to hear former First Lady Michelle Obama speak at a rally on Tuesday in College Park, just south of downtown. Many were bussed in from Atlanta’s historically Black colleges and universities, proudly donning the colors of Harris’ sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

But Laquann Wilson, a 27-year-old student from Alabama State University, traveled hours to attend the nonpartisan rally. Wilson says he’s open to “learning to work together” across political differences but doesn’t identify strongly with either party.

“At the end of the day, we all need jobs. The cost of gas is high for everyone. So, if you can help me with a better economic policy, I don’t care if you’re Republican or Democrat,” Wilson explains. “I just want a president who is wise and has clear policies for the Black community.”

Taylor, the co-founder of the Black Male Initiative, believes that Harris has the better policies for Black men.

He points to her plan to provide loans that would forgive up to $20,000 for Black entrepreneurs to start a business, as well as her goal to legalize marijuana so people of color can have access to the booming multi-billion-dollar industry.

But Taylor emphasizes that it’s important to remember – especially when discussing the role of Black men in the election – that the Black vote doesn’t operate in a vacuum.“We have always been amongst the most progressive voting blocs in this country since the inception of our right to vote – in spite of being drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, and killed on the road to the polls.”

So, while the Black vote “is a powerful voice and critical component,” Taylor says, it’s not up to them alone to put any particular candidate in office.

“If we don’t win, it’s not because enough Black men or women didn’t show up. It’s because well-meaning white women and men didn’t vote their conscious. That’s what is going to keep Vice President Kamala Harris from the White House. It’s not the brothers.”

Melissa Cruz is an elections reporting fellow who focuses on voter access issues for the USA TODAY Network. You can reach her at mcruz@gannett.com or on X, formerly Twitter, at @MelissaWrites22.

Georgia’s top election official on Thursday night blamed “likely foreign interference” for a video that is quickly racking up views on social media and purports to show a newly-arrived Haitian migrant claiming he voted for Kamala Harris just six months after arriving in the United States. 

The video is “targeted disinformation,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said, as he specifically called on Elon Musk, the billionaire Donald Trump supporter, to take down the video. Raffensperger said his office is working with federal officials to investigate the video, which had more than half a million views on Musk’s social media platform X as of Thursday night.

In a press release, Raffensperger said that “we ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” adding: “This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort. Likely it is a production of Russian troll farms.”

Raffensperger said federal law enforcement officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are investigating the video. 

Last week, U.S. intelligence officials blamed Russia for a fake video designed to smear Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. 

During the 2024 election cycle, Musk has emerged as one of Trump’s top boosters, pouring roughly $119 million into a Super PAC, called America PAC, to promote the former president. Musk has frequently shared unfounded claims of anti-Trump election fraud, and this week he requested that users submit instances of “election integrity issues” to the “X Election Integrity Community,” a channel that features America PAC’s branding.

While Musk hasn’t personally shared the new video flagged by Raffensperger, the video has been shared in multiple posts featured in the X Election Integrity Community.

The video depicts a young Black male claiming he is from Haiti and came to the U.S. “six months ago.”

“We are voting Kamala Harris,” the male says in the video. “Yesterday we voted in Gwinnett County and today we’re voting in Fulton County.”

The male and another male in the video then display six Georgia IDs, at least three of them duplicates, apparently as proof that they’d acquired the documents required to vote. 

After Trump lost in Georgia in 2020, he and his allies attempted to overturn the election results in the state — leading to criminal charges for Trump and 18 others. In the years since, Trump and the MAGA movement have worked diligently to cement his election lies into policy in the state, packing election boards at the state and county level with election deniers.  

In both counties mentioned in the fake video — Gwinnett and Fulton — election officials have questioned the results of 2020’s election and backed rules passed by the new MAGA majority on the Georgia State Election Board that were designed to give county election officials authority to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results.

Those rules, and another designed to slow counting of votes, were recently found by judges to be “unconstitutional” and will not be in place for Tuesday’s election. 

Election board members in the two counties did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The fake video, which began circulating as early as 1 p.m. on Thursday, has more than 500,000 views in various posts on X. The disinformation video comes amid Trump and his VP candidate J.D. Vance’s vicious smear campaign against Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio; they have baselessly claimed the migrants are eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. Trump has threatened to deport them, even though most of them are living in the U.S. legally.

It is illegal, and extremely rare, for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Republicans have nonetheless frequently claimed that Democrats are allowing migrants into the U.S. so they can gain their votes, and the GOP intends to use claims about noncitizens voting — however unfounded — to call the 2024 election results into question if Harris wins or has the lead.

Not long before Raffensperger’s press release, a screenshot of the video was shared on the Facebook page of Georgia’s most prominent election denial network, VoterGA.

“He needs to go to jail,” wrote a woman in the forum, referring to the male in the video.

Musk’s call to use X as a forum for sharing claims of election fraud has been heeded by users, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Last week, Greene took to X to claim that voting machines in her district had “switched votes.” 

Local election officials and Raffensperger’s office quickly debunked the claim, saying that the voter’s printed ballot did not match up with her selections on the machine because the woman had made mistakes herself. 

Greene has gone on to continue to claim that machines are flipping votes, posting a video on X Thursday night that purported to show one such instance in Arkansas.

The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party gets underway this weekend as No. 2 Georgia faces off against SEC rival Florida on Saturday. Let’s check in with the latest prediction for the game from an expert football model that projects scores and picks winners.

Georgia improved to 4-1 in SEC play two weeks ago in a signature victory at Texas that salvaged the team’s playoff hopes but there are tougher tests ahead before the selection committee sorts it all out.

Florida moved to 4-3 on the year with a 2-2 mark in conference games after knocking off rival Kentucky and is a respectable 34th nationally in passing output with 264 yards per game, averaging almost 31 points per game heading into the most brutal portion of any schedule in college football this season, playing 4 ranked opponents over the final 5 weeks of the year.

What do the analytical models suggest for when the Bulldogs and Gators renew their rivalry this weekend?

For that, let’s turn to the SP+ prediction model to get a preview of how Georgia and Florida compare in this Week 10 college football rivalry game.

As expected, the models are favoring the Bulldogs over the Gators, but in a closely-fought game.

SP+ predicts that Georgia will defeat Florida by a projected score of 34 to 22 and will win the matchup by an expected margin of 12.5 points.

The model gives the Bulldogs a strong 78 percent chance of outright victory over the Gators.

SP+ is a “tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency” that attempts to predict game outcomes by measuring “the most sustainable and predictable aspects of football.”

How good is it this season? So far, the SP+ model is 239-221-5 against the spread with a 51.9 win percentage after going 28-27-1 (50.9%) last weekend.

Georgia is a 14.5 point favorite against Florida, according to the updated lines posted at FanDuel Sportsbook.

FanDuel set the total at 51.5 points for the game (Over -110, Under -110).

And it lists the moneyline odds for Georgia at -630 and for Florida at +460 to win outright.

If you’re using this prediction to bet on the game, you should take …

If you do, you’ll be in the minority of bettors, who expect the Bulldogs will dominate the Gators, according to the latest spread consensus picks for the game.

Georgia is getting 64 percent of bets to win the game and cover the big spread.

The other 36 percent of wagers project Florida will either win outright in an upset, or more likely, will keep the score to 2 touchdowns or fewer in a prospective loss.

Georgia has played some closer games this season, coming out 11.3 points ahead of its opponents this season when averaging out the scoring margins in wins and losses.

Florida has fared 2.2 points better than its opponents on average in 2024.

Those figures have grown closer over the last three games, however.

Georgia has been 14.3 points better than the competition over that span, and Florida has improved to being 11 points better than opponents over that time.

Georgia is averaging 30.5 points per game this season, compared to Florida at 28.5 points per game on average.

Defensively, the Bulldogs are surrendering 19.2 points per game and the Gators are allowing 26.3 points per game on average.

Most other analytical models also suggest the Bulldogs will take down the Gators this week.

That includes the College Football Power Index, a computer prediction model that uses data points from both teams to simulate games 20,000 times to pick winners.

Georgia came out ahead in the majority 79.9 percent of the computer’s most recent simulations of the matchup.

That leaves Florida as the presumptive winner in the remaining 20.1 percent of sims.

How does that translate into a margin of victory? The index forecasts that the Gators will take the points this week.

Georgia is projected to be 12.4 points better than Florida on the same field in both teams’ current composition, according to the model’s latest forecast.

Georgia is first among SEC teams with an 84.5 percent chance to qualify for the College Football Playoff, according to the FPI’s metrics.

That model projects the Bulldogs will win 10 games this season.

Florida could struggle getting to bowl eligibility, according to the index’s calculations entering this weekend.

The Gators are projected to win 5.7 games and have a 54.7 percent chance to become eligible for a bowl game.

When: Sat., Nov. 2
Time: 3:30 p.m. Eastern
TV: ABC network

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Game odds refresh periodically and are subject to change.

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