The state of Georgia is one of the key swing states in this year’s presidential election with 16 electoral votes. President Biden won it by just 0.2 points in 2020, while President Trump carried it in 2016 by five points.
All the evidence indicates that President Trump will reclaim the Peach State for himself in 2024.
He is currently holding a substantial, four-point lead in the RealClearPolitcs polling aggregate for the state, and Republican turnout outnumbered that of the Democrats by more than 2:1 back in March as well, despite the primaries being uncontested on both sides by that time.
Now, Republicans have even more good news coming out of Georgia. A state-wide election was held for a seat in the Supreme Court of Georgia on Friday 24 May, and incumbent conservative Andrew Pinson beat his liberal challenger by exactly 10 percentage points, 55–45. Pinson got 644,349 votes, while the challenger John Barrow got 527,997 votes.
This came in the wake of a series of losses for Republicans in ballot initiatives and similar special elections, which many contributed to dissatisfaction among voters about the overturning of Roe v. Wade in July 2022. However, with such a massive victory for conservatives in a crucial swing state, these worries have been somewhat put to rest. Barrow made abortion rights the centre message of his campaign.
The losing streak for major special elections for Republicans had already been broken before the Georgia election, by the way. In early April, the GOP-proposed referendum passed in Wisconsin in a landslide, mandating stricter election integrity rules in another key battleground.
Similarly, the Republican Governor Biran Kemp of Georgia signed into law stricter election regulations in May. The legislative package defines what is needed for probable cause to remove someone from the voting registry if irregularities are suspected. Also, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been removed from his post at the State Election Board. Raffensperger, while a Republican himself, was seen by supporters of President Trump as too lenient in dealing with accusations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
President Trump got some recent good news for his campaign from outside Georgia as well.
Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, his biggest challenger in the 2024 Republican primary, told the audience in a Q&A session after a speech at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington DC that she is voting for President Trump in November. While she originally pledged to support whoever her party’s nominee is in the general election, she later walked back on that commitment. After exiting the primary race, she said that Trump would have to earn her and her supporters' votes. It seems that Governor Haley thinks Donald Trump has done enough. This comes despite the coordinated efforts by the Biden campaign to court Haley’s supporters.
President Trump still maintains his lead over President Biden in the national polling aggregate by RCP,
which has been the case since early September. His lead is 1.1 points in the head-to-head contest, which expands to 1.8 points when three other candidates—Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Cornel West, and Jill Stein—are included in the polls. We are now a little more than five months away from the 2024 US Presidential election.
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