Power Up: Trump’s last-minute push in Georgia highlights concern about Biden rise in traditionally red state

WHEN IN ROME: President Trump spent a chunk of his precious final 48 hours before Election Day in Rome, Georgia — a sign he’s concerned about his prospects in the historically red state that has not gone blue in a presidential race since 1992. 

Trump, who won the state by five points in 2016, played up his stop last night at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains as a symbol of loyalty to his base: “They said, ‘Sir you don’t have to come to Georgia. We have it made,’” Trump told the crowd. “But I said I promised we have to be here.”

• Then there was this plea: “But by the way … just come out and vote.” 

Democrats are making a last push in Georgia: Joe Biden’s rise there — a Washington Post polling average shows the Democratic nominee ahead by a statistically insignificant two points — is enough to draw major attention to the state. 

• Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) campaigned in Gwinnett County on Sunday afternoon and former president Barack Obama will visit Atlanta tonight to get out the vote. 
• The Biden campaign is counting on high turnout from Black and Brown voters, the fastest-growing demographics in Georgia. But they’re also trying to cut into Trump’s support from White voters — in particular, White women and seniors – from the suburbs. Trump’s trip indicates he’s intensely focused on shoring up his support from rural voters in the campaign’s final days. 

Republicans are increasingly down on their chances in the state, up and down the ballot: “We are seeing slippage all across the board, except for White working-class men,” a GOP strategist familiar with races in Georgia told us. “The president’s team did not take Georgia serious early enough.”

• Early voting and internal polling give some clues: “Judging by the gender gaps we are seeing in the state, Trump is in serious trouble,” the strategist continued. “It’s progressively gotten worse for Trump in the Atlanta ‘burbs as Black voters as a percentage of the electorate has increased. In order to win Georgia, you need to somehow perform better with Black voters — which is not happening with this president — or improve numbers in suburban areas with college-educated whites. And he’s losing them.”
• “That Trump is coming back — again — tells you that they are very concerned about Georgia,” Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor, told Power Up. “It’s remarkable that Trump is having to campaign here on the final days of the campaign which is a state he should be able to take for granted … Any time he is spending in Georgia he’s not spending anywhere else.”
• Democrats are also speculating based on early voting numbers: “If you look at maps of precinct turnout — places like Rome that are bright red do not have very high turnout right now,” said a staffer for Georgia’s Democratic Party.   

The Trump campaign maintains that Trump is going to win Georgia — and they’re betting big on Election Day turnout from Republicans. Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh noted “there are also two Senate races where he wants to help out … On his way to Florida, it was easy to stop and ensure the turnout we’re looking for.”

• Strategists from the National Republican Senatorial Committee believe that at one point, Biden hit 50 percent in Georgia, a “terrifying” figure for the NRSC as they try to defend two U.S. Senate seats, our colleagues Seung Min Kim and Paul Kane reported last week.
• The two Senate races are some of the most competitive in the country: Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) is facing off against Jon Ossoff and appointed Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler is trying to fend off a challenge from GOP Rep. Douglas A. Collins and Democratic opponent Raphael Warnock. 

• Hillary Clinton won 21 percent of the White vote in the state, according to 2016 exit polls. Abrams won 25 percent of the White vote. Also in 2018, Democrats won a significant victory when Lucy McBath ousted Karen Handel (R) to represent the 6th U.S. congressional district, and the two are facing off again this year.
• The Biden campaign adviser predicted that if the former vice president can drive up his support with White voters to closer to 30 or 32 percent in the state, paired with strong turnout from Black voters, he has a serious shot of flipping the state.

The numbers are looking good to the Biden team so far: Trump in 2016 carried White voters and seniors by a 54-point and 36-point margin respectively, according to exit polls. Trump still leads with both of these groups, but Biden is outperforming Clinton at the moment, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released in mid-October.

• Biden leads Trump by 86 percentage points among Black voters, per the poll. Among Georgia women, that poll showed the Democrat beating Trump by 14 points.
• Biden is currently polling at 36 percent of White voters compared to Trump’s 63 percent and 48 percent of seniors versus Trump’s 49 percent.
• “You need all the other groups to narrow on the margins,” the Biden campaign adviser said. “So if we do better even by a point or two or three with White seniors or non-college educated Women or in the non-metro Georgia area — it’s not part of your base but it’s important because it all adds up.”

If Biden does win the state, a new army of suburban women and seniors pushing for Democrats in historically red communities like Cobb and Gwinnett County will be a big part of why. “They finally realized that the stakes were too high and that they had to come out of the closet as Democrats so to speak,” Jacqui Bettadapur, the chairwoman of the Cobb County Democratic Party, said of women in her neighborhood. 

• “I had never had a Democratic canvasser come to our house before … after 2016, we were shocked to see so many people come out of the woodwork, wanting to make a change,” said Rebecca Elliot, a 51-year-old mom who campaigned last weekend for Sara Tindall Ghazal, the Democratic candidate for a local State House race in Cobb County. 
• “This is the year of angry suburban mom and yeah, there’s a lot of us,” said Cynthia Rozzo, a 58-year-old Republican who lives in Marietta and unsuccessfully challenged the GOP incumbent Matt Dollar, who has held the seat since 2003, in a 2012 primary.
• Rozzo voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 before casting her ballot for Clinton in 2016 because she couldn’t stomach Trump. While she’ll be supporting one or two or her local GOP candidates, she’s proudly supporting Democrats at the top of the ticket again, including Biden.
• “There’s so many people in our area who are upset with Republicans in general because of Trump and it’s trickled down to local races,” said Rozzo. “Trump has been good in a way to waking everyone up to vote and ask the question, ‘Who is representing you?’” 

ONE DAY MORE: “Biden’s campaign events in Philadelphia marked the kickoff to a 36-hour blitz of Pennsylvania, broken only by an added side trip to next-door Ohio, where a victory would offer another pathway to the 270 electoral votes the winner needs,” Annie Linskey reports.

• “The Biden campaign was intensifying its push … encouraging supporters from out of state to join canvassing efforts that for months it had sworn off because of the health risks. The campaign said that volunteers had knocked on more than 350,000 doors on Saturday, and made 2 million calls and sent 1.5 million text messages to voters in the state.”

The Biden campaign’s final day: The former vice president will also hold a afternoon event in Cleveland. 

The incumbents: “Convinced that it’s too late to change the minds of voters who are not yet sold on Trump, the president’s advisers are intensely focused on turning out those who are,” Toluse Olorunnipa and Josh Dawsey report. 

• “Trump’s decision to forgo a broad, unifying closing message and instead double down on appealing to a narrow but enthusiastic slice of the electorate is a gamble. Whether it pays off or becomes a cautionary tale will not be known until the polls close Tuesday and the votes are counted.”

The White House’s schedule: Much like his final weekend, Trump is ending with an ambitious jaunt. He’ll travel to four states (N.C., Penn., Mich. and Wis.) today. He’ll end in Grand Rapids, Mich, the same place he closed his 2016 campaign with a late night rally. 

• Pence: The vice president has two events planned in Pennsylvania, one in Latrobe and another in Erie.

• Key graf: “Trump’s approach to politics has always been to treat it as something of a mystical proposition, governed by otherworldly forces in a world in which things generally work out in his favor.”

WHERE THINGS STAND AT A GLANCE: A snapshot from some polls released over the weekend.

Pennsylvania (20 electoral college votes): Washington Post-ABC poll (Biden +7). 

Florida (29 electoral college votes): Post-ABC poll (Trump +2)

Iowa (6 electoral college votes): Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom (Trump +7)

Michigan (16 electoral college votes): CNN poll (Biden +12)

Wisconsin (10 electoral college votes): Times-Siena College poll (Biden +11)

Arizona (11 electoral college votes): Times-Siena College poll (Biden +6)

TEXAS SUPREME COURT DECLINES GOP CHALLENGE: “A legal cloud hanging over nearly 127,000 votes already cast in Harris County was at least temporarily lifted when the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by several conservative Republican activists and candidates to preemptively throw out early balloting from drive-through polling sites in the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county,” the Texas Tribune’s Jolie McCullough reports.

• But it’s not completely over: “The two sides are scheduled to gather for an emergency hearing Monday morning before District Judge Andrew Hanen, an appointee of President George W. Bush,” Elise Viebeck reports.

A handful of prominent Republicans condemned the suit: Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich called it “morally reprehensible“; former Texas state House Speaker Joe Strauss deemed it “patently wrong,” adding it was “attempting to disenfranchise more than 100,000 voters”; and even a member of arguably the state’s most famous modern political family joined the chorus of denunciations. 

• Pierce Bush, a grandson of President George H.W Bush and nephew of President George W. Bush, previously ran for the U.S. House this cycle: 

NEARLY 100 MILLION AMERICANS HAVE ALREADY VOTED: “In the earliest days of voting, registered Democrats outvoted Republicans roughly three-to-one in battleground states that provide partisan breakdowns. As Election Day nears, however, that gap has narrowed,” Brittany Renee Mayes and Kate Rabinowitz report.

DIVISIONS PLAY OUT ON THE STREETS: “Vehicles with Trump flags halted traffic on Sunday on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey and jammed the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge between Tarrytown and Nyack, N.Y. Another pro-Trump convoy in Virginia ended in a tense shouting match with protesters as it approached a statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond,” the Times’s Rick Rojas, Jennifer Steinhauer and Emma G. Fitzsimmons report.

Trump supporters are stepping up their public displays: “No injuries — or ostentatious displays of rifles and pistols — were reported, but the demonstrations underscore the unusual nature of this national election and the ends-justify-the-means tactics Trump and his supporters often embrace,” Scott Wilson, Mark Berman and Kayla Ruble report.

Trump defended his supporters who surrounded a Biden bus: “Several dozen trucks, SUVs and cars bearing pro-Trump signs and flags surrounded the Biden campaign bus as it drove down a Texas highway on Friday, forcing the bus to slow down and veer out of its lane, according to Tariq Thowfeek, the communications director for the Biden campaign in Texas,” the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Restuccia reports.

• The FBI is investigating the incident: “Staff called 911 and local police met the bus at its final planned stop of a three-day tour of Austin, Thowfeek said. Biden campaign staff subsequently canceled the event.”

• Atlas appeared to snipe back at Anthony S. Fauci over comments Fauci made to our colleagues over the weekend: “Fauci said Biden’s campaign ‘is taking [covid-19] seriously from a public health perspective.’ Trump, Fauci said, is ‘looking at it from a different perspective.’ He said that perspective was ‘the economy and reopening the country,’” Josh Dawsey and Yasmeen Abutaleb report. The White House unloaded on Fauci for the interview, saying it was “unacceptable and breaking with all norms.”