Red flags are surfacing for President Joe Biden in the swing state of Georgia less than eight months before the election.
Biden, who beat Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, is staring down a sizable deficit in the polls to the Republican presidential candidate. Combine that with low turnout in last week's Democrat primary, and strategists say the Biden-Harris campaign has a problem repeating in the Peach State.
"The bad news (for Democrats in Georgia is) an enthusiasm gap between Democratic voters and Republican voters," Atlanta-based Democrat strategist Fred Hicks told The Hill. "The question for Democrats is not for whom you're going to vote in November; it's whether or not you're going to vote."
Total turnout for the Democrat primary was just shy of 290,000 while nearly 589,000 voted in the Republican primary. Neither Biden nor Trump have active challengers running against them, at this point.
Further, another 6,000 left their ballots blank in the national "Leave it Blank" campaign to protest Biden's approach to Israel thus far in the war in Gaza. Blanks amounted to 2.2% of all Democrat ballots cast, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported.
Biden will also miss the bump from down-ballot races that helped propel him in 2020. State Democrats turned out to elect Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock to the Senate, the state's first Jewish and Black senators, respectively. Both of their terms run through 2026.
"The question is: Can and how can Biden-Harris get the Democratic turnout to match 2020 without the historic nature of other races on the ballot?" Hicks told The Hill.
Then there are the polls.
Trump owns a 5.7-point lead over Biden in Georgia, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. The two most recent polls, both released this month, have Trump leading by 4 and 3 points, respectively.
One of those polls, Emerson College, has Trump leading Biden by 8 points on the issue of immigration on the heels of the death of Laken Riley at the hands of a Venezuelan illegal.
"Today, if I were operating either of these campaigns, I would probably rather be in the Trump campaign's position, I think. But it's very tenuous," Ben Taylor, a professor of political science at Kennesaw State University, told The Hill.
Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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