More than 129,000 voters have registered in Georgia since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, which could be a good sign for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Georgia is among several battleground states that could decide the 2024 election between Harris, the Democratic nominee, and her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Polls show the state has gotten more competitive in the two months since Harris entered the race after Biden dropped his bid for reelection on July 21.
The state has seen at least 120,000 new registrants between July 21 and September 8, according to data compiled by L2 Data that Newsweek has reviewed.
Democrats registered more voters in that period—about 51,000—while Republicans registered 13,000. At least 64,000 of the registrants are unaffiliated voters.
But the surge of new voters, especially young people and people of color, could give Harris an edge in Georgia, which Biden won narrowly in 2020.
Most new registrants are young; some 56 percent are 34 or under, with 18-year-olds accounting for about 20 percent. More than half (about 53 percent) are voters of color.
Newsweek reached out to the Harris and Trump campaigns via email for comment.
Harris, the first Black and South Asian vice president, has the overwhelming support of Black voters. Polling shows she is doing better with Latino voters than Trump. Georgia also has significant numbers of Indian Americans, who could help propel Harris to the White House if they turn out for her.
Meanwhile, Harris has a 31-point lead over Trump among likely voters under 30, according to a new Harvard Institute of Politics survey.
It comes after the Democratic National Committee recently launched a voter registration campaign at historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions in Georgia and five other battleground states.
Young voters are “critical to the coalition that Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz are building ahead of November’s election,” Jaime Harrison, the chair of the DNC, said in a statement. “The DNC is taking every opportunity to reach students where they are and make sure they have all of the tools they need to vote this November on the issues that matter most to them.”
Charles Bullock, a professor at the University of Georgia, told Newsweek that Democrats “have done well among young voters and voters of color” in recent elections.
“To win Georgia, Democrats need strong support from non-White voters, and they need for these groups to turn out in large numbers,” Bullock said.
Recent polls have shown Harris “not meeting the level of support from minorities that she would need to win Georgia. To the extent that the ranks of minority voters are increasing at rates greater than White voters, this is potentially good news for the Harris campaign,” he said.
Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, told Newsweek that the “surge of voter registrations among youth people and people of color in Georgia can only spell good news for Harris.”
“It’s a testament to the strength of her campaign’s ground game and relentless focus on mobilizing demographics that disproportionately support Democrats. While not all new registrants will show up on Election Day if even a fraction do, it could tip the balance in Harris’s favor in crucial battleground states,” Gift said.
Bullock said Democrats’ challenge will be mobilizing the young voters who have recently registered to vote.
“Young voters tend to be the age cohort least likely to go to the polls, and newly registered voters of all ethnicities, especially if they have no experience with voting, may hesitate to venture into this unknown process,” he said. “They may not even know where to go to cast a ballot. Having volunteers go door-to-door is a way in which to contact and answer questions of the recently registered while encouraging them to participate in the electoral progress.”
Bullock noted that because Republicans “dominate” rural Georgia, Democrats “must stockpile enough urban votes to withstand the rural preference for Republicans if the state is to be in the Harris column on November 5.”
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