Former President Donald Trump is working overtime to avoid losing Georgia again in 2024 after his narrow defeat there in 2020.
President Joe Biden edged the incumbent by roughly 12,000 votes in 2020, snatching victory from Trump in a state he had won in 2016. Black voters have been the fastest-growing voter demographic in the state and could have been key to a Trump victory then.
A few weeks after Trump made an appearance in Atlanta, the campaign is making a conscious effort to make Georgian black voters direct their attention to Trump in 2024.
A new ad released by Trump’s Super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc, is targeted at rural black voters in central Georgia. The video features a Biden campaign worker reading off a phone bank sheet directed at potential voters.
The worker answers the phone with a man on the line responding that he voted for Biden “last time,” before listing reasons he’s disillusioned with the current administration. The worker responds by saying Biden “pays rents for newcomers to America,” as she glances at the sheet, which instructs the worker not to say “immigrants.”
The caller denies the worker’s efforts to shift their vote, saying that “Biden’s paying rent for illegals,” as a news article appears on screen.
That article refers not to a Biden plan, but to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D-MI) program to pay $500 to “Newcomer” households. The program is, however, supported in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The caller finishes the ad by saying things “were better before Biden. I’m voting for Trump.”
Another article flashed on the screen in the ad’s closing seconds, showing a January poll featuring a decline in black voter support for Biden from 87% in 2020 to 63%. The ad appears to emphasize that drop, highlighting “black, hispanic, young voters abandon Biden,” in the article’s title.
Georgia contains the nation’s third-largest black population at 3.7 million people and saw a 22% voter turnout for the 2022 midterm elections.
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Georgia has already played a key part in the 2024 election when the former president was booked at Fulton County Jail on charges that he attempted to overturn the state’s election in 2020 as he now awaits trial. Soon after his mugshot, Trump raised $7.1 million for his campaign.
Trump holds a 5.8% running poll average lead over Biden in Georgia as of Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight.