Trump Ties Georgia Funding to Political Loyalty

Donald Trump told Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins that he could call whenever he wanted help for Georgia, then warned that reelection for Jon Ossoff could mean otherwise. Acting out a hypothetical call from Ossoff asking for state funding, Trump said: “I don't give a damn what he wants.” The exchange puts the leverage plainly: federal help, in Trump’s telling, depends on who wins.

At stake in Georgia next week are a Senate seat and the governor’s office, with both major parties pouring time and resources into the state. The three most recent Senate matchups went to runoffs. President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama both held rallies in Georgia during the week before the vote.

Who Gets to Decide

At an Oct. 28 rally south of Atlanta, Obama appeared with Ossoff and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms. Thousands of Democrats had lined up for hours. Ossoff spoke before Obama, and a “Yes we can” chant broke out. Obama called Ossoff an outstanding senator twice.

MS NOW polling averages put Ossoff ahead of Republican Mike Collins, 52.6% to 42.4%. NBC’s forecast called Georgia “Likely Democratic.” Ossoff is campaigning on affordability, health care and government accountability; he has accused Trump and his allies of corruption and conflicts of interest. Collins, who won his nomination in a June runoff, is campaigning on Trump’s agenda, immigration enforcement and smaller government.

Trump has made Georgia a focus, campaigning twice in Dalton in the past two weeks. He disputed his 2020 election loss in the state, refused to concede to Joe Biden and failed to overturn results in several states, including Georgia. In January, he urged a Georgia official to recalculate the presidential results in his favor: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” In 2023, Trump and others were charged with attempting to overturn his loss in Georgia; after Trump returned to office, the case was dismissed “in its entirety.”

The governor’s race is considered a toss-up. Bottoms is running against Republican Rick Jackson, a 72-year-old billionaire, to succeed Republican Brian Kemp, who cannot seek a third term. Bottoms says she wants to “deliver for working families and bring steady leadership to Georgia in the midst of uncertainty and chaos coming from Washington.” Jackson has accused Bottoms of failing to deal with crime while she was Atlanta mayor. He has spent more than $200 million of his own money on advertisements featuring demonstrations and violence in Atlanta following the 2020 killing of Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man, by a white Atlanta police officer.

The Cost at the Bottom

The numbers from early voting are large, but they don't show whether more people will vote overall or whether voters are casting ballots earlier. The Georgia Secretary of State’s Election Data Hub showed 2,513,780 ballots cast as of early Friday, Oct. 30—33.4% of the state’s 7,530,664 active registered voters. The figures were unofficial and subject to updates. Georgia had surpassed its 2022 early in-person record, with 2,294,275 ballots cast in person, above the 2,289,951 recorded during the entire 2022 early-voting period.

The pressures behind those ballots aren't abstract. Retired Fulton County voter Victoria Williams, who lives on a fixed income, said: “You just only get the necessities of life and just try to make the money go a lot further than it has been.” Gas, health insurance and everyday prices brought her to the polls. George Greenlee said he had cut back at the grocery store: “You don't buy those little, you know, extra things, pastries and stuff like that. You get. You get what you need.”

David York, a retired school principal who still works part time, said he had “less left over” and that his Social Security raise had not kept up with inflation. The Social Security Administration said checks would rise 3.6% in January. Medicare premiums were also expected to rise, with most people having them deducted from Social Security checks; the final premium for the next year was due in November. As Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University, put it: “Those price shocks are going to hit you harder than somebody who might be in a more comfortable economic situation.”

Organizing, Ballots and Barriers

Michelle S. Hite, an associate professor of literature, media and writing at Spelman College, said students had organized around access to voting locations. She described the issues shaping election conversations as economic pressure, education, health care, immigration and access to polling places. “When you're not the 1%, you encounter those issues as lived,” Hite said. “They're not abstractions.” She cautioned that high early voting could mean people were voting earlier rather than increasing overall participation.

Early voting ends Friday, Oct. 30. In Gwinnett County, 13 advance voting locations were scheduled to operate from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.; voters could use any advance voting location in their registered county. On Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3, voters must go to their assigned precinct. Absentee ballots must reach a county elections office by 7 p.m. Tuesday; a postmark alone doesn't meet the deadline. State law requires officials to report early-voting results and absentee ballots received by Monday no later than 8 p.m. Tuesday, but that deadline doesn't mean every race will be decided by then.

Georgia voters are being asked to choose who will hold office while living with rising costs, limits on voting access and a funding promise framed around political loyalty. The ballots are being counted. The power to set the terms remains with the people who already hold it.