Georgia Democrats brace for a ‘tough fight ahead’ in keeping the state blue in 2024

ATLANTA — Georgia was the site of Democrats’ biggest breakthrough in the 2020 election, with Joe Biden becoming the party’s first presidential nominee to win the state in 28 years.

But four years later, some of the organizers who helped orchestrate the history-making victory acknowledge Democrats face an uphill climb to keep the state blue as they prepare for a rematch with Donald Trump.

“This is certainly not going to be a walk in the park,” said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of the voting rights group Black Voters Matter. “I think that we certainly have a tough fight ahead of us.”

Brown is among the activists credited with helping turn out Black and younger voters, who helped carry Biden to victory in the state in 2020.

But she said the mood is much different among those voters this time around, as a sense of fatigue with the political process has set in.

“You get to the tipping point where people really want to see change, and I think the rate of change for things they want to see is not happening as fast as they want to see it,” Brown said.

“It’s sobering to deal with the reality of how slowly change actually happens,” she added.

In 2020, Biden won Georgia by just 11,779 votes, becoming the first Democratic presidential nominee to carry the state since Bill Clinton in 1992.

Two months after Biden’s victory, Georgia voters sent two more Democrats — Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff — to the U.S. Senate in runoff elections, flipping the state’s two seats and control of the Senate from the GOP.

At the time, Georgia was heralded as an example to other local Democratic parties of how to organize and turn out voters in traditionally red states.

But four years later, early polls suggest Biden has lost significant ground in