ATLANTA — Two weeks ago, staffers working for the major Democratic campaigns and party committees were demoralized and depressed, their dream jobs transformed into a joyless death march. Donations were drying up, while candidates and elected officials were speaking openly and with a grave certainty that the party was destined for an extinction-level electoral wipeout in November.
In the world of two weeks ago, the graphic Democratic euphoria on display in Atlanta Tuesday would have been almost inconceivable: a Division I basketball arena packed so full of ecstatic supporters that the fire marshal was refusing to let anyone else in. There was simply no space left. Ticket holders, credentialed press, elected officials who failed to make it inside the Georgia Convocation Center lined the barricades along Capitol Avenue, in the 91-degree heat, to watch a succession of celebrities on the Jumbotron.
It’s been just ten days since Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential campaign, and the vibe shift was spectacular. Vice President Kamala Harris’ Atlanta rally — the first bonafide campaign event since she took control of the Democratic ticket — had the energy of a homecoming rally. Stacey Abrams, Sen. Jon Ossoff, and Sen. Raphael Warnock spoke. Megan Thee Stallion stunted on stage, a “Hotties for Harris” banner billowing in the stands behind her. “I know my ladies in the crowd love their bodies,” she said. “And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for.” Quavo of Migos introduced the guy who introduced the vice president.
Peggy Golden traveled from her home in Savannah to be here: ”This is history,” she says. Golden is going to be 79 in December; she was born before the Civil Rights movement began. “I was brought up on a plantation,” she says. Her parents were a cook and caretaker. “I didn’t expect it to happen in my lifetime — and, hey, here it is,” she says of seeing a woman — a black woman — become president. “I feel it in my bones that it’s going to happen.”
But for all the excitement — and there seemed to be an endless supply of it in Atlanta — some attendees were still reeling from the political whiplash of the last few weeks. “I loved Biden and I was heartbroken when he dropped out of the race,” Lynda Cosby-Pinnock says. And she cautions Harris still has work to do to convince members of her own community she deserves their support, “Some people say they don’t know who she is, they’re not sure what she stands for,” she says.
Sydney Rhodes, a 28-year-old influencer, says she was always going to vote for the Democratic candidate: “I would vote for anybody besides Donald Trump and Project 2025.” But, she adds, “I think a lot of people are unsure because of the quick switch, and I hear a lot of people talk about her past as a prosecutor.”
Harris, for her part, is not shying away from her history as a prosecutor, district attorney, or attorney general. On stage in Atlanta, she lead with what has become her signature line: “In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain — so hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”
And in Atlanta, Harris showed a new willingness to place, at the center of the campaign, an issue Republicans are convinced is her biggest weakness: immigration.
“I was the attorney general of a border state,” Harris said on stage on Tuesday. “In that job I walked underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico on that border with law enforcement officers. I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers that came into our country illegally. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been talking a big game about securing our border, but he does not walk the walk. Or, as my friend Quavo would say, he does not walk it like he talks it.”
Biden — with Harris’ help — won Georgia in 2020, but it will be a heavier lift four years later: As Rolling Stone has reported, Trump’s allies’ have transformed the state into a “laboratory” for strategies to contest the 2024 election, as one source close to the former president put it. Georgia Republicans have enacted a sweeping voter suppression law, empowered activists to file mass challenges to residents’ voter registrations, and packed the state and county election boards with Trump devotees who both believe his lies about the 2020 election and who have shown an increasing willingness to refuse to certify election results.
By launching her campaign in Atlanta, the Harris campaign was sending a clear signal: They intend to compete everywhere, including in states that seemed, two weeks ago, to be slipping out of their grip.
According to the campaign, more than 7,500 have signed up to volunteer in Georgia in the last week alone. In a call with reporters ahead of the launch, a Georgia state director for the Harris campaign reported that they’ve hired more than 170 Democratic staffers across 24 offices around the state — the largest in-state operation of a Democratic presidential campaign, she said, ever. And when she touched down in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon, it was the sixth time Vice President Harris has traveled to Georgia this year, and her 15th trip since taking office in 2020.
“I am very clear: the path to the White House runs right through this state,” Harris said on Tuesday. “You all helped us win in 2020 — and we’re going to do it again in 2024.”
