and she endorsed him over Hillary Clinton in 2007 when she served as the district attorney of San Francisco, bucking most of the Democratic Party establishment.
Georgia is a top battleground state and Atlanta, with a significant Black population, is its biggest driver of Democratic votes. But the vice president’s support among Black voters, especially Black men, has been lower than is typical for a Democrat running for president. This month, Mr. Obama suggested sexism was to blame. On Thursday, one of Ms. Harris’s introducers, Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, tried to pour cold water on fears that Black men would support her opponent.
We’re not confused,” he said. “We know that this is the man who was held accountable by the Justice Department because he wouldn’t even rent apartments to Black people,” Mr. Warnock said.
In 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Georgia by fewer than 13,000 votes, the first time a Democrat had carried the state in a presidential election since 1992. His victory — powered, in part, by demographic shifts and a concerted Democratic effort to reach new voters in the state — has left the party dreaming of a repeat this fall. But polls show an exceedingly tight race.
Both campaigns have responded by pouring resources into Georgia, where more than two million people have already voted. Mr. Trump visited on Wednesday for the second time in eight days, and Ms. Harris’s trip on Thursday was her second in a week.
As it has elsewhere, Mr. Trump’s campaign has focused on the economy and immigration in Georgia. As he tries to provoke fear about the increase in migrants crossing the border during much of the Biden administration, the former president has frequently cited the death of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student who the authorities said was killed by an undocumented immigrant.
The Harris campaign has emphasized abortion rights as a top issue in Georgia, which bans the procedure in most cases at about six weeks. On the trail, Ms. Harris and her allies have told the stories of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, two Georgia women who died after treatment delays that stemmed from the ban, according to reporting by ProPublica. Now Ms. Harris is trying to win the support of moderate independent and Republican voters by blaming Mr. Trump for the abortion bans passed in many conservative states.
“In every state in the South, including Georgia, there is a Trump abortion ban,” she said on Thursday. “Many with no exceptions even for rape or incest.”
Although Ms. Harris was well received in Clarkston, there were dangers in following Mr. Obama, one of the nation’s most gifted political orators.
As she spoke, some members of the crowd, who had waited for hours in the heat, started trickling toward the exits.
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