Dontaye Carter, a Democratic party organiser in Fulton County, Georgia, has a blunt message for Joe Biden from the front lines of the most crucial political battleground in the American south.
He sees troubling signs that Biden’s re-election campaign will struggle to turn out the young and racially diverse voters he needs to defeat Donald Trump, his Republican rival, again.
Carter does not see Trump gaining much support in this disproportionately African-American liberal stronghold that cuts across the heart of Atlanta — but many black men especially are “resigned” and might skip the election, he said.
“That’s the issue that we’ve got to fix,” Carter said at a Mediterranean restaurant in Sandy Springs, north of the Georgia capital, after a party meeting on Thursday night.
“Somebody needs to ring the bell that the house is on fire, and nobody’s ringing that bell.”
With less than six months to go before the November general election, Biden is racing to shore up and reboot the centre-left political base that helped him unseat Trump in 2020.
It is especially urgent in Georgia, which was crucial to Democrats at the last election when Biden won the state’s 16 electoral college votes by a tiny margin. Voters then returned two senators to Washington, giving the party control of the upper chamber.
Georgia was also at the centre of Trump’s efforts to reverse that election result, as he implored the state’s senior election official in a phone call to “find” him 11,780 votes to overturn his losing tally. Trump and several allies were indicted last year in relation to those efforts, although the date for his trial is not yet set.
Despite that controversy, Trump has momentum in the state, according to polls.
In part this is because Biden’s grip over the non-white vote has slipped in the past four years. There are several causes: disenchantment with high inflation and the cost of living, fractures over his handling of the war in Gaza, and disappointment especially in the Black community with the failure to secure deals in Congress to protect voting rights and reform policing.
According to an NYT/Siena survey released this week, Biden leads Trump by 55 to 14 per cent among Black voters in Georgia, compared with an advantage of 88 to 11 per cent according to CNN’s exit polls in the state in 2020. Overall in Georgia, Biden trails Trump by six percentage points, though he was also behind at this stage in the race in 2020 and won with a late surge, according to the Fivethirtyeight.com polling average.
“It’s going to be a close race — it was close last time,” said Scotty Smart, a Democratic political activist in south-western Atlanta, at the counter of a local TGI Friday restaurant at lunchtime. “The environment is a little different though. I think it’s gonna be a little bit more of a struggle.”
Biden is trying to tackle those concerns. The president on Sunday delivered the commencement address at Morehouse College, the historically black university in Atlanta where the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr once studied.
He touted his administration’s investments in black communities, his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first black female Supreme Court justice, his student loan relief scheme, and said he was trying to bring about an “immediate ceasefire” and a “lasting peace” in Gaza. “I know it breaks your heart, it breaks mine as well,” he said of the conflict.
Without mentioning Trump, Biden also blasted “extremist forces aligned against the meaning and message of Morehouse”. Earlier in the week, Biden directly attacked his rival during an appearance with Big Tigger, an Atlanta radio host.
“Look, Trump hurt Black people every chance he got,” he said. “Black unemployment . . . went up under Trump. Trump’s tax plan reinforced discrimination . . . They botched Covid-19 response, leaving Black people dead and Black-owned businesses shuttered.”
“He wants our vote, he needs our vote, because he knows that Donald Trump is getting out there to everybody,” said Faris Womack, a graduating senior at Morehouse, standing outside the bookstore on campus on Friday.
Womack said he would vote for Biden because he is the “best option right now”, but had “mixed views” about him. “As far as his policies and how he does things, I question it sometimes. The whole thing with Palestine is messed up,” Womack said.
But Chris, another graduating senior who declined to give his last name and voted for Biden in 2020, is leaning towards Trump this year, mainly because of foreign policy.
“A lot of people overseas are pushing us around,” he said. “[Trump] is a tyrant, he’s an evil guy. He is what he is, but people aren’t going to try and mess with us if they think our president is dangerous.”
Democrats hope that even if Biden loses some ground with parts of his base — including Black men — he can make it up by improving his performance with moderate older voters and women who have been turned off by Trump and outraged by his role in restricting abortion rights.
Some anti-Trump Republicans in Georgia have already backed Biden, including Geoff Duncan, the state’s former lieutenant-governor, who wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution newspaper that he would support “a decent person I disagree with on policy over a criminal defendant without a moral compass”.
The Biden campaign is also more rapidly building out its campaign offices and operations, fundraising more effectively and already spending money — including $14mn on television adverts across the swing states targeting non-white voters. And they hope that once Biden and Trump hold their first televised debate in late June in Atlanta, the contrast with the Republican rival will help energise their voters.
But Republicans are also confident they are on track to win back Georgia, as long as Trump can win back traditional conservatives who preferred Nikki Haley in the party’s primary this year and turn out the former president’s rightwing base.
“Republicans have to be much better at getting out the early vote, and not waiting until election day,” said Bob Anderson, a retired marketing consultant at a Republican stall at a fair in Roswell, a north Atlanta suburb.
For Smart, the Democratic activist, a concern is what he calls “the landscape of political ignorance” — including a belief he’s heard repeated among some voters that it was Trump who delivered the $1,400 stimulus cheques in early 2021. In fact, it was Biden.
People were “not knowing who’s doing what, who’s responsible for what, who’s accountable for what, and social media sometimes hurts this conversation”, Smart said.
Carter warned that the big drivers of black turnout in 2020 — including the fallout from the pandemic and outrage at the murder of George Floyd — had faded. Biden needed to make a better case for re-election than the one he was currently offering.
“This whole ‘Anybody but Trump’ message is not going to work. It’s falling on deaf ears,” he said.