Georgia saved the Democrats 4 years ago. Now they need a replay.

RIVERDALE, GA. When union agitator Tracy Thornhill walked up to a one-story house on a bright, cloudless day in Riverdale, Georgia, a blue-collar town of 15,000 people south of Atlanta, he found a receptive ear for his speech about making sure you vote for Kamala Harris in the November election. , not for Donald Trump.

“Trump has made a lot of mistakes, like his entire camp, this has never happened,” a young African-American man said through a crack in the screen door, noting complaints about the GOP candidate’s first term in office. “I’m not an idiot. I don’t forget things easily,” he added.

Thornhill—one of 260 members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) knocking on doors in Georgia this month urging voters to support Harris—thanked the man, reminded him to have a voting plan, and then suggested off to the next house in Clayton County, a heavily Democratic, majority-Black county that is Georgia’s fifth most populous.

“People always take the black community for granted, but now we’re letting them know we can be taken seriously,” observed a 59-year-old former truck driver from nearby Hampton as he stepped out onto the sidewalk in a pair of white and black Nike shoes. “I don’t think it’s as close as they say,” he added of polls showing an extremely tight race in the state.

Four years ago, black voters in Georgia helped turn the state blue for the first time in decades by voting Joe Biden president and winning Senate seats in two failed runoff elections that gave Democrats control over US Senate — a loud rebuke of Trumpism and his handling of COVID-19. As a result, the party was able to pass a historic list of accomplishments, including fighting the pandemic, reforms to lower drug prices, massive investments in green energy and manufacturing, and the appointment of the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Two years later, one of those senators—Raphael Warnock—created another scandal, surpassing Georgia football legend Herschel Walker.

Now that the anxiety is growing cracks in the Democratic “blue wall” in the states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, as well as some polls suggesting Trump is making gains among Latino and black voters, Democratic Party hopes once again that the Peach State and its growing minority will come to the party’s defense and turn the page on Trump once and for all.

“In 2021, Georgia literally saved the country. Now we’re going to do it again,” Warnock told a crowd of 23,000 people Thursday who came to hear Harris and former President Barack Obama at a raucous rally in Clarkston, another densely populated suburb east of Atlanta. “This is more than an election. This is a moral moment for America.”

This time, however, Democrats faced a tougher political environment. Although the economy has recovered and inflation is falling, Americans still consider the cost of living a top issue, giving the Republican Party a decisive advantage. Trump’s bumbling handling of COVID, which gave Biden an advantage in 2020, appears to have faded from voters’ minds as he stokes fears about undocumented immigrants, crime and transgender people in the final days of the race. In Georgia, Trump currently leads by 1.6 percentage points. according to FiveThirtyEight poll average.

Priorities USA, the Democratic Party’s leading super PAC, expects this year’s election to be as close or close as the last two presidential elections. For example, in 2020, Biden won Georgia by just 12,000 votes. Priorities USA projections show a margin of fewer than 1,000 voters in 2024—small enough to automatically trigger a recount.

“There are few convincing voters left. No matter how you define them, the audience is clear: young voters, voters of color and women. How they break will affect the election,” Priorities USA said at a briefing for reporters last week.

Democrats see reproductive rights as a driver of voter turnout in Georgia, which has the strictest abortion law – a six-week abortion ban – of any battleground state. At a rally in Atlanta earlier this month, Harris highlighted Trump’s role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. She also criticized him for the dismissive attitude he spoke about the grieving family of Georgia mother Amber Thurman, who died after waiting 20 hours in the hospital to be treated for complications caused by an abortion pill.

“Where is the compassion?” Harris asked, reacting to Trump’s comments at the Fox News town hall. “He trivializes their grief by making it about himself and his TV ratings. This is cruel. And listen, I promised Amber’s mother that we would always remember her story and say her name.”

Getting more young people to vote is another priority for Democratic organizers in Georgia. The New Georgia Project, a nonprofit founded by Stacey Abrams that helped turn the state purple by registering thousands of new voters in marginalized communities, has a goal of knocking on 1 million doors this election. So far it is reported that it has affected about 600,000 homes.

Three brothers—Mudrick McWilliams, 20, Nassir McWilliams, 20, and Egypt McWilliams, 19—are part of the effort. When they’re not playing music or learning to code, they’re knocking on doors together in Fulton County, Atlanta’s largest county, where Democrats are hoping for a massive presence to counter Trump’s power in large swathes of rural Georgia.

“There are tangible changes we can make in our community by voting. Obviously, change takes time, but there are things we can do,” Mudrick McWilliams told HuffPost while canvassing in a low-income area, discussing abortion rights, child tax credits, funding for HBCUs and lowering the cost of prescription drugs.

“Many of these communities, which still have large black, low-income communities, are more susceptible to propaganda. They’re much more likely to just believe, ‘Oh, Trump is going to give us money,'” he continued.

Mudryk also said he’s seen younger people in the community who are drawn to Trump because of misconceptions that they “are dissidents to the point where they see everyone else saying, ‘Hey, I want to vote for Kamala.’ just because she’s black or because she’s a woman. Like, it’s not like that.”

Campaigning is not always rewarding work. The brothers, two of whom are twins, often found no one at home or moved to different addresses after the last election. The risk of being stung by hornets while walking in the Georgia heat created additional problems.

In the final days of the race, Harris made an appeal to young voters, whom she leads over Trump by a 2-to-1 margin. according to the Harvard Institute of Politics survey held this week. At her celebrity rally alongside Obama near Atlanta on Thursday, the vice president said young Americans are “rightly impatient for change” and urged them not to give up hope.

“You, who have known only the climate crisis, are leading the fight to protect our planet and our future,” Harris said. “You, young leaders who grew up in active shooter training, are fighting to keep our schools safe. You, who now know fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers, stand for reproductive freedom.”

Trump is also making a concerted effort to reach younger voters, especially men, by appearing on podcasts aimed at Gen Z and using cryptocurrency. His campaign has outsourced much of its voter turnout efforts to several outside groups, including right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action and billionaire Elon Musk’s American Committee, rather than leading that campaign and the Republican National Committee. This is a dubious and risky strategy.

On Wednesday, Trump appeared at a huge rally organized by Turning Point Action in Duluth, a battleground suburb north of Atlanta. It featured pyrotechnics and flashy concert lighting, with country music star Jason Aldean warming up the crowd. And three conspiracy-oriented Trump supporters: former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and a conservative commentator. Tucker Carlson — joined Trump on stage as a guest to deliver a speech. Carlson called him the “dad” of America and said that by defeating Harris he would give the country a “hard flogging.”

“When dad comes home, do you know what he says? You were a bad girl,” Carlson said. “You’ve been a bad girl, and now you’re going to get a hard spanking. And no, it won’t hurt me any more than it will hurt you.

Trump, meanwhile, urged his supporters to vote for him “any way you want,” highlighting his campaign to secure early voting for Republicans, something he has repeatedly denigrated in previous elections. Georgia has broken voting records so far, with nearly 2.75 million of its 7.25 million registered voters having already cast ballots. However, it is too early to tell which party is voting in larger numbers and what (if anything) that means for the overall state of the race.

Walking down a quiet Riverdale street Friday, Thornhill said he was confident Georgia would again reject Trump and make Harris the nation’s first black woman president.

“There’s a lot more at stake now,” he said. “We thought the last election was something special because we were going through COVID. This one – you’re talking about a man punishing his enemies and calling in the National Guard – this guy has gone crazy.”

“We have to do this. We can’t go home,” he added, walking up to the driveway to ring another doorbell.