(Georgia Recorder) — Georgia’s delegates to next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago largely say they are backing Vice President Kamala Harris to be the party’s next presidential nominee after President Joe Biden announced he would not run for re-election over the weekend, endorsing his former running mate.
Biden’s decision came following weeks of pressure from members of his own party after a debate performance Democrats described as disastrous raised new concerns about the 81-year-old’s mental fitness. Democratic voters also wanted a different nominee, according to polling.
Delegates from around the country – mostly elected officials and party boosters – will gather in Chicago starting Aug. 19 to name the next nominee. Georgia will provide 108 pledged delegates.
The Democratic Party of Georgia announced late Monday evening that the delegation endorsed Harris but provided no details.
One of the delegates is former State Election Board Member David Worley, who is serving as a Democratic Party delegate for the eighth time, dating back to the 1980 election when the 21-year-old Worley pledged his support for Jimmy Carter.
“Every time before now, I’ve been pledged to support a particular candidate, and that’s the candidate I’ve voted for at the convention,” said Worley, who spent 17 years on the State Election Board. “This time, we’re unpledged, since President Biden is not running, although I’ve endorsed Vice President Harris.”
Despite the unique circumstances surrounding the election, Worley said Harris is a good choice for the lead candidate considering her professional experience in criminal justice.
“She’s a prosecutor and Trump’s a criminal so I think that’s a great contrast,” Worley said.
Democratic state Sen. Harold Jones of Augusta is serving as a presidential delegate for the first time. Jones said he did not anticipate this degree of craziness around the nomination process, but he also expressed his support for Harris to become the party’s nominee and expects to vote for her next month.
Jones said he followed Harris’ career closely as she rose from San Francisco District Attorney to California Attorney General in 2011 before serving in the U.S. Senate and the White House.
In 2004, Jones became the first African American elected as Solicitor General for Richmond County, a role he would be reelected to in 2008.
“I’m 100% behind her,” said Jones, who is also the senate’s Democratic Whip and has served in the Senate since 2015. “For one, it’s a natural progression. She’s been vice-president and has been successful in this administration.”
Jones said it would be unrealistic for any other candidate to step in this close to Election Day.
“The reality is the election will be here fast, and we really cannot afford to try to go to anyone else. I wouldn’t be in favor of that anyway but also, just from a practical standpoint, it’s not possible,” he said.
Worley and Jones’ takes are popular among Democratic delegates now that Biden is out. Harris is the favorite among convention delegates unofficially polled by the Associated Press, although no potential challengers have yet announced, and Georgia delegates who spoke to the Georgia Recorder Monday said they backed Biden until the end, and now plan to lend their support to Harris.
“The party understands what’s at stake here, so I don’t think anybody’s necessarily going to be scared, but at this point, we are trying to put a lot of strategy and thought into where our next moves are because we’re so close to the election,” said state Rep. Dar’shun Kendrick of Atlanta.
“The end goal is to unify all the Democrats, to come out of that convention, or even before the convention, as a united front, and to know that we have a common enemy, which is to make sure that Donald Trump doesn’t get anywhere near the White House.”
Kendrick called it a “sad moment” when Biden bowed out, but she said she believed Democrats will be able to attain that unity. She praised Harris’ work with the administration and noted the potential historic nature of her run. If she became president, Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, would be the first woman to hold that office, as well as the first Black woman and first Asian-American.
“She has a great legacy on which to start her campaign because of all the hard work that Joe Biden has done. So I have no doubts that she is going to do as well and hopefully soar to the heights that we need in order to defeat Donald Trump,” Kendrick said.
Sandra Williams, a convention delegate and president of the Atlanta North Georgia Labor Council, said she did not like the way she felt Biden was made to step down, but she also would not react kindly to anyone who announced a run against Harris.
“I would tell them to sit down,” Williams said. “She has earned that over the last three and a half years. She has solidly been the vice president. She’s worked on all these initiatives in terms of lowering drug costs, infrastructure building, the amount of money in terms of repayment of student loan debt for citizens, over $16 million sent to eradicate some of the problems with (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in terms of their finances.”
“I think that it is her turn,” she added.
Atlanta Democratic state Rep. Jasmine Clark said she can’t see herself supporting anyone else next month.
“To be able to run a 100-and-something-day campaign is something that is no small feat, and I don’t think there is any other person who could put their hat in the ring that I would be confident that they would be able to do this the way I’m confident that VP Harris can do it,” she said. “So it would be very difficult for someone to convince me that they would have the ability to raise the energy level and get the word out and campaign for the next 106 days the way VP Harris can.”
Before Biden dropped out, there was no shortage of motivation for volunteers and organizers who were bent on denying Trump another term in the White House, said Brenda Lopez Romero, a former state lawmaker who chairs the Gwinnett County Democratic Party.
“The energy of why people are committed to organizing and to turn out the vote really is that, at the end of the day, the alternative on the ballot is simply not a good choice for America,” Lopez Romero said Monday.
But back-to-back high-stakes elections in Georgia had taken a toll, she said. Georgia famously helped put Biden in office in 2020 before sending Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate in a nationally watched runoff election, only to come back in 2022 to find Georgia back in the national spotlight and Warnock again on the ballot in a race that also went to a runoff.
“People were tired – voters were tired – of ‘Come out to vote one more time, one more time,’” Lopez Romero said.
Lopez Romero said suddenly having Harris as the likely nominee has reenergized Democrats, who are quickly coalescing behind Harris, while putting to rest the distracting debate over whether Biden should remain on the ticket. With Biden’s endorsement and Harris’ role as half of the Biden-Harris administration, she felt like a “natural fit” for many Democrats, Lopez Romero said.
And she said she isn’t aware of any Georgia delegates who are withholding support from Harris.
Michael Owens, mayor of Mableton and former Cobb County Democratic Party chair, said he thinks Harris’ presence at the top of the ticket will reinvigorate voters.
“I was absolutely in support of the Biden reelection campaign, but I do think that Vice President Harris now brings a different dynamic to this election,” he said. “Look at it this way, President Trump at the RNC convention they just had, spent all this time and effort attacking and going after someone that’s no longer in the race.”
“It’s a new race now. It’s a new ballgame,” he added. “They’ve got to retool. I think the Democratic Party is very firmly in a situation to be able to be on the offensive right now and completely put the Republicans on their heels.”
Benching Biden and putting Harris at the top of the ticket could help Democrats’ chances, said Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie, but it won’t fix all their problems.
“Replacing Biden with Harris removes the issue of mental acuity from the table. It does not remove what Republicans think are the weaknesses of Biden’s record on the table, because as vice president, she’s attached to the administration,” Gillespie said. “And it still doesn’t change the perception that this is a little chaotic – because it is, right? So I think there is still an element of crisis management that has to be involved in this discussion.”
Georgia Republicans have wasted little time tying Harris to the inflation and immigration rates of the past three and a half years, and Harris will not convince many Republican voters, Gillespie said. Democrats are hoping instead that she will be able to move more moderates to their column.
“Everybody who was going to vote for Joe Biden is definitely going to vote for Kamala Harris, for sure,” she said. “But that’s been the dynamic of this cycle. Hardcore Democrats will vote Democratic, hardcore Republicans will vote for Republicans.”
“The question then becomes, for those voters in the middle who are still unsure, one, are they going to show up to vote? And then two, assuming that they are going to show up to vote, what was driving their indecision? Was it a lack of knowledge? Was it concerns about Biden’s cognitive ability? Was it concerns about Donald Trump’s legal issues? There are lots of factors that might put people on the fence. I think what Democrats are gambling – and it is a risk – is that this might help to persuade some folks who are still on the fence about who to support by saying, ‘Hey, you now don’t have to worry about whether or not the Democratic candidate is cognitively up to the job.’”
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll conducted earlier this month before Biden withdrew, found Georgia voters favored Trump in a hypothetical matchup against Harris, 51% to 46%, but polling conducted since Biden’s announcement is not yet available. Monday’s Real Clear Politics polling average gave Trump a four-point lead over Biden in Georgia, 46.2% to 42.2%.
Democrats are hoping Harris will get a bump in polls once voters learn more about her. Lining up around Harris also bolsters the impression that the party is unified heading into Chicago, Gillespie said.
“I think they’re doing so in the hopes to mitigate the possibility of having a contested convention, because that would probably not bode well for the Democratic Party in the long term,” she said. “It would make them look so fractious that it would be really hard to bring everything back together.”
Georgia Recorder intern Kate Verity contributed to this story.
