Morehouse College students participate in a get-out-the-vote march Thursday to an early voting location near campus. Jill Nolin/Georgia Recorder
When Rollin Jackson Jr. and other students at Morehouse College heard that turnout had been light at Flipper Temple AME Church, they quickly hatched a plan to march as a group to the polling place.
A group of nearly 100 students – many of them first-time voters – gathered on the penultimate day of early voting and made the half-mile trek down Atlanta Student Movement Boulevard to the closest precinct, chanting and singing along the way.
“It is a short walk and a short time to vote for a long time of peace and prosperity,” Jackson, who is president of the student government association, said into a megaphone. “So, thank you all for exercising your God-given rights to vote. We love you all. We appreciate you all.”
This group of young Black men represents a part of the electorate in Georgia that has been the target of both presidential campaigns this year, with former President Donald Trump aggressively courting them.
There has been public hand-wringing over Vice President Kamala Harris’ lagging support among Black voters, particularly Black men, though some prominent Georgia Democrats have said they are more worried about these voters staying home than voting for Trump.
They may have differing views, but these Morehouse students said they wanted to dispel any notion of apathy among Black and youth voters.
“I think young people are energetic about this election – 100% – and they’re ready to see change,” said 19-year-old Christopher Lambry, who is backing Harris. “I think a lot of young people are hopeful and truly, truly optimistic about this election, so they’re ready.”
Lambry and his cousin and fellow Morehouse student Dohnoven Dixon said the Democrat outreach efforts have paid off with at least them. Lambry also lit up while talking about his experience at former first lady Michelle Obama’s nonpartisan When We All Vote rally in Atlanta.
But they said they know of other Black men who are skeptical of Harris and what she may do for them. Lambry argued that a quick Google search will turn up Harris’ economic plans and how they might benefit Black men.
“A lot of the conversations I’ve had with certain Black men who want to vote for Trump, it’s simply been purely economic,” Dixon said. “Whether it was a stimulus check, or they feel like Trump had a better economy, whatever that may mean.”
But Dixon argued that some things are bigger than money. He pointed to the controversial Project 2025, which is an influential conservative think tank’s presidential transition plan. Trump has tried to distance himself from the plan.
“Money is not the most important thing, especially not for this election right now, in the state of our country,” Dixon said.
But other Black men are not convinced.
Marques Moore, a rideshare driver originally from West Virginia who now lives in Atlanta, said he voted for Trump recently at C.T. Martin Recreation Center in Atlanta. He said his top concerns this election are immigration and the economy.
Moore said he thinks his generation’s access to the internet – and the ability to more easily see how others are faring in comparison – has led to Black men rethinking their historical allegiance to the Democratic Party.
“So I think people are just looking for change, whether or not Trump brings that, I think is irrelevant, but it’s going to put pressure on the Democrats to construct a better policy to approach Black men on the next cycle,” Moore said.
Back at Morehouse, Jackson said how the students in the march voted was beside the point.
“You might not agree with a candidate on 100% of things. That’s just politics. You’re not going to,” he said in an interview. “But your vote matters. Your voice matters. Your understanding of different issues matters.
“So, my advice to everybody would be, even if you feel like you don’t agree 100%, still make your voice heard. Make your vote heard.”
A fight to the finish
Friday marked the end of three weeks of early voting in Georgia and set the state up to potentially etch a new highwater mark.
Just over 4 million of Georgia’s 7.2 million active voters had already cast a ballot ahead of the election, representing more than 55% turnout, according to the secretary of state’s office. That includes 3.7 million who voted early in person and more than 240,000 who voted by mail. This year’s numbers dwarf the nearly 2.7 million who voted early in 2020 during the pandemic when absentee voting spiked.
If just 1 million Georgians cast a ballot on Election Day, the state will beat its 2020 total turnout record.
As of Saturday, 92 of Georgia’s 159 counties have surpassed 50% turnout. The counties with the highest percentage of turnout are rural and tend to support Republicans, including Towns, Oconee and Dawson counties, but some heavily populated metro counties that give more votes to Democrats are also exceeding the state average, including Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb.
Even though some voters just opted to cast their ballot before Tuesday’s big day, political observers say they expect the final tally to surpass the record turnout seen in 2020 when nearly 5 million Georgians voted.
Both candidates and their surrogates were in Georgia over the weekend to make their final appeals to last-minute voters after months of campaigning in one of the seven battleground states.
And while the early voting numbers do not reveal which presidential candidate is leading, they do offer some clues. At a time when Trump maintains a slight edge over Harris in the polls, there are still positive signs for both sides.
Voter turnout among Georgia women has been strong, representing about 56% of the electorate at a time when Harris is doing well with women in polling. But at the same time, rural Trump-friendly counties – like Towns County in ruby red northeast Georgia – are punching above their weight.
“The big question is, we see a lot more enthusiasm with Republicans coming out, but is it kind of just like rearranging the furniture in your living room? You’re not adding anything new, you’re just changing where things are?” said Kennesaw State University political science professor and former Cobb County GOP chairman Jason Shepherd.
“We won’t know until after Election Day really how many new voters Republicans have or if they’re able to have been able to increase their margins.”
Still, Shepherd said he thinks signs are good for the former president. He said he expects Trump to win Georgia this time after narrowly losing by less than 12,000 votes four years ago.
Shepherd said early voting in Georgia has only been around for about 16 years. For a while, there was a generational split in the party on early voting, but he said the current generation of Georgia Republicans is more comfortable casting their ballots ahead of Election Day.
And after discouraging his supporters from voting early in 2020, Trump often urged them to bank their ballots as soon as they could this time. At a rally in Duluth last month, signs directed his supporters to “go vote now.”
“While Democrats were very quick to embrace it much more so than Republicans, Republicans have kind of caught up, and this has just taken time,” Shepherd said.
Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, agreed that there are signs of trouble for Harris going into the final day of voting.
The most glaring issue: Black voters represent about 26% of those who have voted so far.
“For a Democrat to win in Georgia, that number needs to be up around at least 28, better even at 30,” Bullock said midday Friday while the polls were still open for early voting.
“And then also, a Democrat needs to run really well among that turnout, and the polling indicates she’s not doing that either,” he added, adding that Biden received 88% percent of Black support with 29% turnout.
The upside, though, is Harris appears to have the share of the white voter support she needs, which is about 30%, he said.
And the final set of polls from The New York Times and Siena College released Sunday indicate that Harris may have made up ground with Black voters, with her registering 87% support among them.
“What I’m going to be looking at Tuesday night is is she running up the kind of numbers she needs to get in metro Atlanta, and if she didn’t, then she’s not going to make it up anyplace else,” Bullock said.
Turnout in the core metro Atlanta counties – Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett – often makes up half the votes for Democrats, Bullock said. Biden came out of those five counties with a lead of over 700,000 votes, he said.
‘Vastly unfair’
In all the talk about percentages, something has been lost, says Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for New Georgia Project, which is a nonpartisan voting rights group focused on empowering the state’s Black and brown communities.
In terms of sheer numbers, Black voter turnout was tracking ahead of 2020 last week, she said. On Friday, more than 1 million Black voters had cast a ballot.
“There’s a little bit of a narrative out there right now about Black turnout being lower, and that’s just not the case,” Ali said.
The difference, she said, is that other groups – like white voters – are turning out at slightly higher rates and so are representing a larger slice of the overall pie.
“It’s all in how people talk about it that can be very discouraging to voters. ‘Well, no one’s turning out, no one’s coming out for it.’ But that’s just not true,” she said.
“It’s almost setting up a narrative of if the Democratic party loses, here’s who we get to blame. And that is vastly unfair,” she also said. “And it happens almost every year in almost any given state that there is some sort of targeting of a voter group, whomever it may be to say, this is why X person didn’t win.”
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