SAVANNAH, Ga. — Beneath palpable enthusiasm for President Trump’s reelection bid, Republicans in Georgia are quietly anxious about his 2020 prospects and steeling for a generational battle for the state’s crucial 16 Electoral College votes.
Support for Trump was unquestionable, and colorful, as more than 1,500 delegates to the Georgia Republican Party gathered last week for an annual convention in this port city and tourist mecca. Around every corner of the Savannah Convention Center, confident activists decked out in MAGA hats and other Trump merchandise raved about the booming economy and other administration accomplishments in between photographs with life-size, cardboard cutouts of the president in his signature, thumbs-up pose.
But in conversations with the Washington Examiner, veteran GOP activists were sober about the challenges confronting Trump in Georgia absent a significant investment in resources. Reliably red since the mid-1990s, the state is in transition, spurred by Democratic gains in the Atlanta suburbs that are partly a byproduct of a rejection of the president. Republicans, chastened by last year’s razor-thin gubernatorial contest, say this evolution might have reached a tipping point.
“In 2012, I was an activist that went to Ohio the last week of the election because that was critical. Georgia was safe in that presidential election,” said Scott Johnson, who lost his bid for chairman of the state Republican Party. “In 2020, people will be coming to Georgia to help us out. We can’t take for granted anymore that Georgia is safely in the Republican column.”
The Republicans have won six consecutive presidential contests in Georgia and control all of the state’s statewide offices in Atlanta and Washington. But in the midterm elections, the Democrats flipped a suburban congressional seat that had been in GOP hands since 1979, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, came within 1.4 percentage points of victory. The Trump campaign appears to have gotten the message.
On Friday, Trump advisers were in Savannah putting on a private seminar for Georgia GOP activists. They explained the campaign’s plans for the state and offered a tutorial on how the voter turnout operation and data program work. According to individuals who attended, the Trump campaign delivered an “all hands on deck” warning that Georgia was “trending” purple and could be lost without an aggressive grassroots commitment from Republicans in the state.
“There is a real sense of urgency that I got from it,” Elaine James, an alternate delegate to the state GOP convention, said after exiting the seminar. “In our past, because we have so many victories, we got lax.”
In 2016, Trump garnered just 50.8% of the vote in Georgia, lower than any Republican nominee this century. That close margin was attributed to Trump’s struggles in the suburbs — an issue that snowballed in the midterm elections and helped the Democrats flip 40 GOP-held seats and win control of the House of Representatives.
Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican who narrowly defeated Abrams in that contest, won by juicing his numbers in the exurbs and rural communities, where Trump is popular. But Republican insiders in Georgia say he unnecessarily neglected the suburbs around Atlanta, nearly costing the GOP the governor’s mansion and a second seat in the House of Representatives. (The Democrats flipped one: the 6th Congressional District.)
They are pledging to remedy that strategic error, a move that fits with the Trump campaign’s plan to place extra emphasis on improving the party’s performance in suburban Atlanta.
“In 2018, in the suburbs of Atlanta, the Democrats had a presidential-level turnout,” said David Shafer, the newly minted chairman of the Georgia GOP. “Some of the issues that you saw in 2018 will be resolved when we’re running a presidential-level turnout operation.”
