Georgia has become a just peachy state for Donald Trump.
On Tuesday, a Georgia appeals scheduled its hearing to determine whether Donald Trump’s push to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from trying her case against the former president for his alleged attempt to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. That hearing is now set for a month before the 2024 election, all but guaranteeing Willis’s case against Trump will not go to trial before Americans head to the polls.
Ironically, many felt that Willis’s sweeping case had a better shot at nabbing a conviction against Trump whereas Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case was seen as flimsier. Now, Bragg can say Trump was gulity on 34 guilty charges while Willis’s case, along with cases brought forth by Special Counsel Jack Smith, hang in judges’ hands.
Furthermore, it looks like Georgia is moving closer into a win for him. A Quinnipiac University poll released this week showed Trump leads President Joe Biden 49 percent to 45 percent. This comes despite the fact that half of voters in Georgia agreed the verdict in New York, including 52 percent of independents.
The poll also asked voters about the case in Fulton County and found that 41 percent of voters believe that Trump did something illegal while 35 per cent believe he did nothing wrong. When it came down to independents, 43 percent believe Trump did something illegal in the case and 29 percent believe he did something wrong.
Still, independents are evenly split between Trump and Biden. Similarly, Biden’s approval rating in the Peach State is dismal, sitting at 36 percent with 60 percent disapproving. These numbers match numerous other polls of Biden trailing Trump nationwide and in other swing states, though his team remains surprisingly sanguine or gets combative when negative polls come out.
By comparison, 48 percent of voters approve of Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and 47 percent approve of fellow liberal Senator Jon Ossoff, both of whom won their Senate seats in the afterglow of Biden becoming the first Democrat to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Biden has been making an aggressive play for Georgia. He gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, a historically Black college that counts Martin Luther King Jr as an alumnus. The Quinnipiac poll showed that 78 percent of Black voters would pick Biden, which is better than his numbers in other states such as Pennsylvania, which has large Black populations.
Later this month, Biden will return to Atlanta to square off against Trump in their first presidential debate.
A big reason for Biden trailing Trump are the issues that voters in Georgia are prioritizing. The survey showed 29 percent of voters consider the economy as the most important factor in their decision and despite the fact the job market is hot, wages are outpacing inflation and inflation seems to have cooled, 44 percent of voters think the economy is poor.
As a result, 58 percent of voters said they think Trump would do a better job handling the economy than Biden.
Similarly, 23 percent of voters say that preserving democracy is the deciding issue. While some might think that gives Biden an advantage, especially since Trump notably tried to get Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and governor to overturn the election results, 49 percent say they trust Trump and 46 percent say they trust Biden.
Meanwhile, 14 percent of voters say immigration is the most important issue for them and 56 percent of voters say they trust Trump.
Democrats have conversely gone all-in campaigning on abortion rights, and 47 percent of voters say they trust Biden more, but only six percent of voters said they consider it to be the most important issue to them.
All of this likely raises the salience of a strong performance in Atlanta later this month for the current president. Meanwhile, Trump seems to be on the road to winning back Georgia just a year after he had his mugshot taken in Georgia.
