The signs are all pointing to real problems for Joe Biden in 2024. Of course, you may not trust the polls, which is understandable, but if you need some convincing that alarm bells are going off at Biden HQ, here it is: the Biden campaign and Democratic donors don’t seem to be willing to invest much money or resources to win Georgia anymore.
"Since 2020, Democratic strategists and activists have fixated on how to expand their gains in Georgia, once a Republican stronghold and now a true battleground,” reports the New York Times. "But some of the state’s most prominent grass-roots organizers — those responsible for engineering President Biden’s victory in 2020 and that of two Democratic U.S. senators in 2021 — are growing concerned that efforts and attention are waning four years later."
The national money that once flowed freely from Democratic groups to help win pivotal Senate contests in Georgia has been slow in coming. Leading organizers, just over a month from the anticipated start of their initiatives to mobilize voters for the presidential election, say they are confronting a deep sense of apathy among key constituencies that will take even more resources to contend with.
And small but potentially pivotal shifts in strategy — cost-conscious measures like delaying large-scale voter engagement programs to later in the cycle or relying more on volunteers than paid canvassers — have privately stoked fears among some organizers about their ability to replicate their successes. More, it has led them to question how seriously Democratic donors and party leaders will take the state in 2024, even as Mr. Biden’s campaign has indicated that a repeat victory in Georgia is part of his strategy.
While the Biden campaign is publicly indicating that it's making an effort in Georgia, behind the scenes it doesn’t really look like it is.
“For some inexplicable reason, a lot of people are leaving Georgia out of the top tier of states to focus on next year,” said Steve Phillips, an early supporter of Stacey Abrams and a progressive Democratic donor from San Francisco. Mr. Phillips said he had been “hearing from top donors, different advisers to billionaires” that “they have a top tier of five states and Georgia is not in it.”
Mr. Phillips also laid the blame on some Democratic leaders. “If the donors are not hearing from the top campaign operatives that we can and should win Georgia," he said, “then the donors are not going to be enthusiastic about it.”
According to the report, the Biden campaign doesn’t even have any existing infrastructure there — a clear sign that Georgia isn’t being treated as a true battleground in next year's election — though one is expected before the primaries.
Related: Oliver Stone: The 2020 Election Might Have Been Stolen
"It's no secret across the ecosystem that fund-raising has been a challenge in 2023 going into 2024," Democratic strategist Jonae Wartel told the New York Times. "I don't think that, in this moment, the resourcing is where it needs to be but I really think it's about engaging and appealing to the donor community to really make early investments."
Recent polling shows Donald Trump with a healthy lead in the Peach State, as well as Biden losing ground with black and young voters. Clearly, Biden and his allies are seeing the writing on the wall.
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