John Jefferson
ATLANTA – The head of the Georgia Democratic Party has a message for right-leaning voters who are undecided about November’s presidential election.
“Vote for someone who is going to move us forward into the next iteration of our country,” Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Ga., told Fox News Digital in an interview roughly a month before Election Day.
“We are tired of the vision of Donald Trump and his Republican Party, because right now what we know is there are Republicans out there willing to put country over party, and we need more like-minded people willing to do that.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has sought to make inroads with a litany of different voting blocs, including those that traditionally skew Republican.
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Likely nowhere will that strategy prove more critical than Georgia, which Democrats are fighting to hold onto after President Biden took the Peach State by less than 1% in 2020, breaking a yearslong streak of the state voting Republicans into the White House.
Williams, who took over as state party chair in 2019 and was elected to Congress in 2020, said Democrats were not taking those recent victories for granted when asked how the Left’s strategy has shifted since then.
“When I became chair in 2019, nobody believed that Georgia was in play,” Williams said. “We are a true battleground state, which means we have to talk to every voter, take nothing for granted.”
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The Democratic leader said the state party’s organizing efforts spanned all of Georgia’s 159 counties, with nearly 30 field offices and more than 200 paid staffers.
“We’ve got to have conversations with the voters about the issues that matter to them. I’m hearing about people who are so concerned that their freedom and our freedoms are on the ballot,” Williams said.
When pressed later about what issues voters are most concerned about, Williams suggested abortion access was a top topic.
She referenced the death of 28-year-old Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother who died after allegedly being denied emergency abortion care for 20 hours after a rare complication from abortion pills.
Democrats and pro-choice activists have blamed her death on the Republican Georgia state government’s recent law banning abortion after six weeks except in cases of rape, incest, or medical emergencies.
Republicans and pro-life groups have pushed back on those attacks, however. They have instead blamed Thurman’s death on complications caused by the abortion pills she took, and argued that there was nothing stopping doctors from performing surgery on her after the fetus’s heartbeat was already stopped.
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“She has an eight-year-old son growing up without a mother. But it doesn’t have to be this way. These are policy decisions,” Williams said.
Meanwhile, both the Harris and Trump campaigns have courted Georgia’s Black population — voters who were key to Biden’s 2020 victory.
Trump has made it a point in particular to try to appeal to Black and brown men, a group of voters who Republicans believe are growing disenchanted with Democrats’ progressive policies.
Williams said Black voters were “not a monolith,” however, and signaled that the Harris campaign is also working to appeal to as many people as possible.
“We can’t win this election based on any one demographic group. We’re building multiracial coalitions here on the ground in battleground Georgia, and we’re going to continue to do that,” Williams said.
“It proved successful in 2020. It proved successful in our run-offs in 2021 and again in 2022 when we sent our senator, Reverend Raphael Warnock, back for a full six-year term. And we’re going to do it again in November.”
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