On Oct. 13, former president Bill Clinton traveled to Albany, Georgia, and urged churchgoers at Mount Zion Baptist Church to rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris in her campaign for the office he once held.
According to ABC News, Clinton emphasized unity in his remarks.
“Uniting people and building, being repairers of the breach, as Isaiah says, those are the things that work,” Clinton told the congregation. “Blaming, dividing, demeaning — they get you a bunch of votes at election time, but they don’t work.”
Clinton also said that the election could turn based on what undecided voters decide over the coming weeks.
“This whole election and the future of the country is turning out to be what people who were sort of on the fence about voting are going to do in the next three and a half weeks,” Clinton said. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
According to ABC News, Clinton asked to be sent to rural areas by the Harris campaign because it is where the former president feels the most comfortable.
Clinton’s ability to build rapport with both rural and Black voters is reportedly seen by Democrats as a positive, but there are questions as to how far that will go as the population that is the most intimately familiar with his presidency grows older.
Black voters are seen as critical to the Democratic Party’s efforts in Georgia, swing voters in a battleground state. In that state, Black voters make up one-third of all registered voters.
In September, Black Voters Matter co-founder LaTosha Brown told NPR that she was concerned that voter suppression and disinformation could have an effect on the election.
“I think what’s frightening is the scope and the intensity of misinformation and disinformation. You know, on social media I’ve seen AI images. I’m seeing these despairing things about VP Harris that I know that are untrue or are false related to her race or identity,” Brown said.
Brown continued, “I’m seeing those things pop up on my timeline, right? And so that frightens me because I think — in the absence of having truthful information — sometimes people will gravitate towards those things that are sensational, and they believe because of the way that it’s presented sometimes.”
Brown also expressed concern that the election certification changes in Georgia could have negative ramifications on the results.
“You also have this process that I’m deeply concerned about now. In the last month or so, there’s been these two rules that have been changed around the certification of election results. And so now you can have an election official to say, ‘I think something is wrong’ — they don’t have to show any proof — so they can actually delay the certification process,” Brown cautioned. “And so that frightens me, that will the election be decided on November 5 in a way that those votes are certified?”
According to ABC News, whoever wins Georgia will most likely win the presidency.
Per a model from 538, if Trump wins Georgia, he will have a 75% chance of winning the White House, but if Vice President Harris wins, she has a 90% chance of becoming president.
Per 538’s aggregate model, the race in Georgia is razor-thin. Trump currently leads the state by a one percent margin, which is closer than he had performed against President Joe Biden before he dropped out of the race. Georgia’s demographics make the participation of its Black voters even more critical.
Georgia, like other Southern states, has a high degree of racially polarized voting. Harris is currently carrying approximately 82% of Black voters in Georgia, less than Biden attracted, while Trump’s 15% share represents a five percent increase in Black support, which could portend a result in Trump’s favor.
According to Vox, however, polling remains an inexact science and functions as a barometer.
According to David Byler, a data analyst and pollster for Noble Predictive Insights, “We’re just not in a world where polls provide that kind of 100 percent, 0 percent win probability. You can get odds, you can get probabilities, you can get sort of levels of certainty. But we’re in an incredibly polarized moment, and [polling] is just not a precision tool that can provide certainty.”
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