Joe Biden will travel to Georgia next week, making a late push in a state that Republicans have won every presidential election since 1996.
Biden’s campaign says he will deliver remarks in Warm Springs, Georgia, on Tuesday afternoon before an evening drive-in rally in Atlanta, the first time he’s visited the state since clinching the Democratic presidential nomination. Biden’s running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, made several stops across Atlanta on Friday.
Warm Springs is a west Georgia town with a population around 400. Biden’s campaign said his remarks there will focus on how “Americans have always come together to triumph and overcome, and that we can, must and will again now.”
Biden’s campaign has for months said it is focusing on re-establishing the Democratic “blue wall” that crumbled when Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania went for President Donald Trump in 2016. But the former vice president’s top advisers have been equally bullish about “expanding the electoral map” to traditionally Republican states like Arizona and Georgia.
Biden visited Arizona earlier this month. His Georgia swing just one week before Election Day indicates he sees what he calls the Trump administration’s bungled federal response to the coronavirus pandemic as a chance to gain more ground.