“When she got officially endorsed, I was like, ‘Thank God.’ I felt like we actually had a chance for something reasonable,” Pauldin of Fayette County, Ga., said earlier this month.
Harris and her vice presidential pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, began a two-day bus tour through the southern part of Georgia Wednesday in an attempt to energize more voters like Pauldin. Since her elevation, Harris has been working to erase former president Donald Trump’s advantage in the critical battleground state. Trump still leads Harris in Georgia, but she has begun to close the gap, according to an average of recent public opinion polls.
Harris is hoping to reproduce one of Biden’s biggest accomplishments from 2020: turning Georgia blue. His razor-thin triumph over Trump was accomplished by getting a diverse coalition of people in metro Atlanta to cast ballots for the Democrat. Given 33 percent of all eligible voters in the state are Black, Harris’s campaign is leaning into her identity as a Black woman.
That’s a Harris advantage that Trump is working hard to negate by spending millions on campaign commercials in Georgia and attempting to appeal to the Black electorate’s economic concerns.
Since mid-June, the Globe has spoken with dozens of Black voters in Greater Atlanta, taking their temperature on a range of topics related to the election.
Neither major party nominee felt like a good choice, Black voters in Georgia said before Harris stepped in, leaving some without a driving reason to go to the polls. When it came to the biggest issues they raised — high cost of living, a divided political landscape, access to quality health care — hope was low that either Trump or Biden could adequately address them.
While there is an expectation in Democratic circles that Harris will help recreate Biden’s victory by delivering the younger and Black voters they desperately need, people interviewed illustrate a more complex narrative. Though Harris already has ironclad supporters, she will still have to convince apprehensive and jaded parts of the Black electorate that she is right for the job.
Victor Nwadike, for one, is not a fan. The 25-year-old founder of a cannabis delivery startup, who lives in Fulton County, said Harris hasn’t done an adequate job addressing issues relevant to the Black community since becoming vice president — namely police brutality, economic empowerment, mass incarceration, and gun violence. It’s the same gripe he’s had with Harris since he first spoke with the Globe two months ago, when Harris was still firmly in the background.
Nwadike is bothered by what he perceives as disingenuous attempts by Harris to court the Black vote in Georgia by emphasizing her own Black identity; for example, by having musician Megan Thee Stallion perform at her Atlanta rally on July 30 and seeking an endorsement from Atlanta rapper Quavo.
“I think she identifies as Black when it’s convenient for her,” he said. “I think she uses [Black people] as a trope.”
When asked what he thought of Trump’s comments falsely questioning Harris’s racial identity, Nwadike responded, “I wouldn’t say he’s wrong.” (Harris has a mixed race background. Her father is from Jamaica and her mother is from India.)
Nwadike remains unsure whom he will vote for, or whether he will vote at all. He previously indicated he favored Trump over Biden, but changed his mind in July when he learned more about Project 2025 — a political initiative that promotes expanding the president’s executive powers if Trump wins, in order to remove obstacles to implementing a range of conservative policies.
Still, Nwadike is hoping a debate between Trump and Harris will help him decide.
“I personally don’t think that either of these candidates give a damn about Black people,” he said. But he will look more favorably upon “the candidate that speaks more to Black issues.”
Elizabeth Whiting, 35, an engineer from Douglas County just west of Atlanta, sympathizes with what she sees as an impossible task for Black leaders such as Harris who reach the upper echelons of power.
“I’m not placing all of the issues for the Black community on her shoulders to clean up and make better, which is what I think some people do,” Whiting said.
For Rue Clark, 51, the opportunity to vote for a potential history-maker is appealing. “I love that there’s an opportunity for a woman of color to be the president of the United States,” Clark, a DeKalb County voter who owns an Atlanta tour guide business, said.
Despite Clark’s overall favorable view of Harris, she is skeptical of what she described as “a little bit of pandering” from Harris’s camp to “more closely associate with the Black community,” she said. “You don’t have to homegirl it up to endear us to you. Just be who you are.”
Clark also has reservations about Harris’s prosecutorial record, specifically against Black male defendants, as San Francisco district attorney and attorney general of California.
“In the Black community, because we have to do so much more to prove to the white community and others that we’re capable, we tend to overdo it,” said Clark.
But Harris’s courtroom pedigree appeared to cut both ways. Multiple voters interviewed said she comes off as intelligent, competent, and straightforward, especially in comparison to Biden and Trump.
Pauldin, of Fayette County, rejected the criticisms of Harris’s connection to her Black identity. “She was an AKA. She’s literally within Black culture,” he said, referring to Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority to which Harris belongs. “It’s not like she’s trying to cater to someone. For all we know, she’s bumping Meg [Thee Stallion] in the car on the way home.”
In June, Tamia Denhart said “there’s not really a good candidate.” Several weeks later, the 22-year-old day-care teacher and Georgia State University student is “100 percent” sure she will vote for Harris because of their alignment on abortion rights and the war in Gaza. Denhart called Black voters who criticize Harris’s expression of her Blackness “one-minded” and said Harris is simply doing what she needs to do to secure votes.
“There were some people who were giving negative backlash, calling [the Atlanta rally] ghetto, saying that, ‘She should have some decorum. Why is Megan [Thee Stallion] performing?’ All of that stuff. That was just very distasteful to me,” said Denhart. “You have Black people tearing each other down.”
Julian E.J. Sorapuru can be reached at julian.sorapuru@globe.com. Follow him on X @JulianSorapuru.
