Team Harris Still Focusing on Georgia’s Black Voters

Happy Wednesday! Election Day is six days away. The whole team is on the road separately this week. We’ll send you our hotel addresses if you want to send us pizza.

Up to Speed

• Vice President Kamala Harris delivered her closing argument in the presidential race Tuesday night, consciously giving the address on the National Mall, where then-President Donald Trump spoke to supporters before the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In the speech, Harris contrasted her message with Trump’s negativity and encouraged voters to “turn the page” on the former president. “This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power,” she told the estimated 40,000-person crowd. “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other.”
• The same evening, President Joe Biden diverted attention from the event when he appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage” while responding to recent comments from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the former president’s Madison Square Garden rally. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters—his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden said to Voto Latino, a voter turnout group that has endorsed Harris. Biden later claimed he was referring to a joke Hinchcliffe made describing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” The White House’s transcript reads a bit different, using the possessive form: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s.” Republicans tried to capitalize on the slip. “You can’t lead America if you don’t love the American People. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have shown they are both unfit to be President of the United States,” Trump posted on X.
• Former U.N. Ambassador and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said in an interview on Fox News Tuesday that she had not spoken to Trump since June, despite her being ready and willing to campaign for him. “They’re very aware that we’re on standby. They know that we would be there to help,” she told Bret Baier on Special Report. “I’ve helped with some fundraising letters and text messages and those types of things, so we’ve done that. But look, we’re on the same team. It is their campaign’s decision on what he needs in these last final days. It does not bother me at all.” The revelation comes a day after the Associated Press reported that Haley had given Trump a list of dates on which she could campaign for him. Nothing has been scheduled.
• Upon his release from prison Tuesday, Trump ally Steve Bannon characterized himself as a political prisoner on an episode of his War Room podcast and at a subsequent press conference. “I’m finally out of being a political prisoner,” Bannon told reporters as he accused Democrats of trying to break him. “I think you can see today I’m far from broken. I’ve been empowered by my four months in Danbury federal prison.” He also said he taught civics to inmates while serving his sentence.

Democrats Hoping for More Momentum Among Black Voters

SAVANNAH, Georgia—A small but lively crowd sang verses from “America the Beautiful” while awaiting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s appearance on Tuesday. Perhaps nowhere is the ode more appropriate than in midtown Savannah after a late-October rainstorm, but the Democratic vice presidential nominee arrived in the historic coastal city with a goal other than sightseeing: urging black voters to vote, and vote now. 

For Alfreda Goldwire, a 74-year-old former union president and school teacher, there was never any question. “I have one daughter, one stepdaughter. I have one granddaughter and I have four great-granddaughters. And I am voting for their freedom,” the self-described Yellow Dog Democrat said at the rally. “I am voting so that they can have a right to not have to go through what I went through in the ‘50s, when there were colored-only bathrooms, colored-only water fountains, colored entries, white entries.”

Goldwire was one of many lifelong Democrats supporting the Harris-Walz ticket on Tuesday. But it remains unclear whether the campaign has reached enough new and undecided voters, particularly among the black Georgians so crucial to the vice president’s victory in the historically red state. Despite a high level of enthusiasm among rally attendees, very few of the Savannah residents Dispatch Politics spoke with elsewhere in the city on Tuesday said they had voted or even planned to do so.

And there are other worrisome signs for Harris in Georgia with black voters. When Joe Biden won the state in 2020, 29 percent of the electorate was black, according to exit polls. But per data from the Georgia secretary of state’s office, the percentage of the in-person early vote and absentee electorate that is black is currently at 25 percent. Multiple political operatives in Georgia tell Dispatch Politics that while there’s still time to turn out more black voters, the numbers aren’t there yet and may reflect a fundamental shortcoming for Harris.

“This week will be important for Harris’ team to drive up the black vote,” said one Republican operative in Georgia.

Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia showed that winning a large share of the state’s black vote is necessary but not sufficient for Democrats hoping to flip the battleground state. His edge that cycle stemmed not from exceptional black turnout but from affluent white voters, particularly women and seniors, energized against another Donald Trump term. The latter group was once again overrepresented on Tuesday at the Walz rally, which, despite being held in black-majority Savannah, drew far more white supporters.

Besides Walz, the speakers featured a lineup of black community leaders, including Savannah Mayor Van R. Johnson, state Sen. Derek Mallow, Chatham County Commissioner Aaron “Adot” Whitely, and former Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools Superintendent Ann Levett. Their eleventh-hour pitch primarily focused on kitchen table issues like the Harris-Walz ticket’s plans to strengthen the middle class, invest in infrastructure, support first-time homebuyers, and promote job creation. 

And by and large, the black voters Dispatch Politics spoke with cited these economic proposals as their main motivation for supporting the vice president. “I think we need a candidate that’s for everybody. She’s for the people,” said Charles Ivory, a 55-year-old Richmond Hill resident, specifically hailing Harris’ economic initiatives centered on small businesses. During the campaign stops at locally owned cafes, barbershops, and bookstores, the vice president has sought to cast herself as a champion of the little guy and her opponent as either financially incompetent, incurably corrupt, or both.

“Let’s just talk turkey about things: Donald Trump’s a loser in everything that he’s done,” Walz said in one of his best-received lines of the day. “That’s not a pejorative, that’s an observation based on facts. He loses jobs, he loses businesses, he loses in court.” 

And for many black Georgians supporting Harris, the former president’s bid for a second term sealed their decision—whether or not they’re particularly enthusiastic about the Democratic ticket. “I’ve always been anti-Trump. I don’t like what he stands for. I’m not 100 percent on Democrats or Harris either, but out of the choices we have it’s definitely a no-brainer for me,” Fred Lloyd, a 32-year-old pedicab driver, said from downtown Savannah Tuesday evening. 

Rally attendee Dan Melvin, whose family moved to Georgia from Haiti, pointed to distressing rhetoric from Trump and running mate J.D. Vance aimed at immigrant communities. “If they’re talking about them, they’re obviously talking about you,” he told Dispatch Politics. “So, I mean, of course you feel like it’s a personal attack.” 

As of Tuesday afternoon, Melvin had not yet cast his vote—“I’m a big procrastinator”—but he said he planned to show up for the Democratic ticket on Election Day. The Harris-Walz campaign likely hopes there are more voters like him come Tuesday, given this year’s underwhelming early voter turnout among blacks so far. Without being too ominous about the left’s electoral prospects in the battleground state, the campaign’s message of the day was clear: In the tight race for Georgia, every vote counts. 

That includes the pockets of black voters dotting Georgia’s Lowcountry, which make for tighter races along the Republican-leaning shoreline. The relatively isolated and impoverished communities scattered across the coastal Atlantic plain tend to escape notice in national election cycles, but Harris and Walz made it a point to stop in Hinesville—the seat of black-majority Liberty County—during a bus tour through Georgia in August. Setting up shop in both Savannah and the city of Brunswick, a 60-mile straight shot down I-95 from here, the campaign has sought to reach untapped voters in the sparsely-populated areas between. 

“There are a lot of communities that are just very separated from municipalities and big epicenters, so they’re not really politically engaged,” explained Angel Ratcliffe, a Harris supporter working on the campaign of Patti Hewitt—the Democrat running against GOP Rep. Buddy Carter in Georgia’s solidly red 1st Congressional District, which encompasses the state’s entire coastline and them some. 

But most eyes are still fixed inland on Atlanta, Georgia’s capital and a key venue for Trump’s stolen election claims after he narrowly lost the state to Biden in 2020. The former president held a rally there on Monday, during which he directed his ire at familiar targets such as immigrants, transgender people, and Michelle Obama. 

From Savannah, several Harris supporters lamented the faultlines reemerging in their politically diverse communities ahead of a contentious Election Day. And there’s one person to blame for the charged atmosphere, they said: Trump. 

But as for Goldwire, the lifelong Democrat and great-grandmother of four, her Christian faith dictates that she turn the other cheek. “I gotta love him, because I’m a child of God and God says we have to love everybody,” she said. “But he is going to one day have to give an account for all the deeds done in this body, and I sure, sure hope that he makes some kind of concession with God before that happens.”

A Duo of Former Dems Casts The Party as Corrupt

MADISON, Wisconsin—The crowd here at the Alliant Energy Center arena had to sit through a lot before hearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. deliver the line of the night. Sitting alongside former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for their final pre-election appearance together on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign, Kennedy took the audience of several hundred on a winding road through his family history with the Democratic party.

“It was inconceivable to me a year ago that I would be anything other than a Democrat,” said Kennedy in his gravelly baritone. “My great-great grandparents, on all sides of my family, came over in 1848 to Boston during the height of the potato famine. They came over penniless, without jobs and without homes, without anything, and they were met on the docks of Boston by the Democratic Party who found them jobs, who found them places to live.”

Kennedy’s nostalgia tour continued for several minutes Tuesday night, with several stops at the presidency of “my uncle” John F. Kennedy, some casual conspiracy theorizing about the CIA, and plenty of focus on how, when the Kennedys were at the forefront of the party, Democrats were opposed to war instead of serving as puppets to the “national security establishment” in Washington. “I could go on and on,” he said, which sounded like a threat.

And then, at long last, he delivered the line with perhaps the biggest applause break of the evening: “I’ve now transferred my allegiance to the unity party with Donald Trump.” He had more to say, but the rowd’s cheers drowned out the rest of his sentence.

Unity has been a theme of the Kennedy-Gabbard double-act, which has made half a dozen stops in battleground states (and Nebraska) as part of the Trump campaign’s “Reclaim America” event series. Another, Gabbard told the crowd in Madison, is love. “We are gathered together and standing together because we’re motivated by the most powerful force that exists, and that is love,” she said.  Gabbard, who served four terms in Congress as a Democrat and even ran for the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, recently announced she was joining the GOP. When she asked the audience in Madison how many were former Democrats like her, about a third of the room raised their hands.

“You are not alone,” Gabbard said as the rest of the audience applauded.

Just as the Kamala Harris campaign has pushed forward surrogates like former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to appeal to disaffected Republicans, Trump’s campaign has embraced Kennedy and Gabbard as avatars for Democrats left behind by their party. Both Kennedy himself and the Trump campaign have cast his decision to drop his independent bid for president and endorse the Republican nominee as a coup for national unity, a marriage of conservatives and the remaining traditional liberals for the common cause of fighting a more sinister threat from Harris and the modern left.

But the focus of the ex-Democratic duo reflects how the GOP’s coalition has welcomed conspiracy theorists and gadflies, and their presence on the trail serves less as outreach to regular Democrats than confirmation to MAGA audiences that their worst assumptions about the Democratic Party’s corruption are true.

In Madison, Kennedy and Gabbard’s closing argument for Trump rested largely on an anti-establishment populism that attacked everything from “Big Pharma” to the supposed “neocons” who are supposedly running everything in Washington—rhetoric that would not be out of place at a far-left rally in the pre-Trump era.

“The thing that I’ll add to what Bobby said about Kamala Harris and why she has earned the support of Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and just about every other neocon in Washington is that they know that she will continue the standard that Joe Biden has set in being a figurehead that they can pass their talking points to and who will do what the national security state, the military-industrial complex, and the neocons want her to do,” Gabbard said.

For his part, Kennedy dwelled on the nefarious influence of shadowy forces—the ever-present “they”—that are directing Harris and the Democratic Party. He noted that Harris was immediately preceded at her address at the Democratic National Convention this year by the “former director of the CIA,” Leon Panetta. He also claimed that “the national security establishment and the neocons” wrote her DNC speech. The modern Democratic party, he said, is the “party of Dick Cheney, is the party of John Bolton,” prompting boos from the crowd.

“They’re doing it right in front of us, and they somehow can hypnotize half the American public into thinking it’s okay, by making them fear the other side,” said Kennedy.

What is unclear is whether any voters remain in the battleground states who will pull the lever for Trump thanks to the Kennedy-Gabbard tour. But the Trump campaign isn’t taking any chances on leaving any RFK Jr. diehards behind. As Kennedy noted in Madison, thanks to a Tuesday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, he will remain on the ballot in both Wisconsin and Michigan over his objections. 

“They want me on the ballot to trick people into voting for me instead of voting for President Trump,” Kennedy said. “And what I’m saying to you is do not fall for that plot. I don’t want your vote. I want you to vote for Donald Trump.”

Eyes on the Trail

• Vice President Kamala Harris today hosts a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the afternoon, the Democratic nominee hosts a campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the evening, Harris campaigns in Madison, Wisconsin, hosting a “When We Vote, We Win” rally and concert with prominent musical artists.
• Former President Donald Trump this afternoon hosts a campaign rally in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. In the evening, the Republican nominee campaigns in Green Bay, Wisconsin, hosting a rally with former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz today campaigns for Harris in North Carolina, encouraging votes for the vice president in Charlotte, Greensboro, and Asheville.
• Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio this evening hosts a Trump campaign town hall meeting in Bedford, Pennsylvania, with guest Tulsi Gabbard.
• Second gentleman Doug Emhoff today campaigns for Harris in Las Vegas, encouraging students attending the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to support the vice president. Afterward, Emhoff will deliver remarks at a volunteer phone-banking session for the Democratic nominee’s campaign.
• Businessman and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy headlines a Team Trump on Tour event in Charlotte this evening.
• Former President Bill Clinton campaigns for Harris in Michigan today, stopping in Muskegon Heights, South Haven, and Benton Harbor.

Notable and Quotable

“Please forgive him for he not knoweth what he said.”

—Former President Donald Trump remarks on President Joe Biden’s “garbage” comments at a rally in Pennsylvania, October 29, 2024