Trump and Harris Scrap for Georgia as Supporters Brace for a Photo Finish

It is unclear which party stands to benefit most from the deluge. While Democrats have encouraged their voters to use any method to cast ballots, Republicans have embraced early and mail-in voting in a significant reversal from last cycle. As Mr. Trump spoke in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta, on Wednesday, electronic signage ringed the arena with a succinct plea: “GO VOTE NOW.”

With exceptionally close races across the seven battlegrounds, Harris campaign officials view Georgia as a potential offset to any losses in the so-called blue-wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — a possible Southern stunting of Mr. Trump’s paths to victory. A win in Georgia, or in similarly tight North Carolina, would amount to a reassertion of Democratic power in the South, a region the party formerly dominated before it became elusive in recent decades. It has only lately become more competitive thanks in part to growing numbers of young voters and people of color.

Mr. Deal, who was elected to Congress as a Democrat at the same time Bill Clinton won Georgia on his way to the White House, said the jockeying of that era for the state’s electoral votes was “nowhere near the intensity that we see now.”

Part of that, of course, can be attributed to changes in technology, communication and the science of presidential politics. Stacey Abrams’s first campaign for governor, in 2018, brought national attention to her strategy of turning out Georgia’s young, infrequent and hard-to-reach voters for Democrats and helped make her a heroine of the state’s presidential election in 2020.

The years after Mr. Biden’s win, though, have been tumultuous in Georgia.

Mr. Trump got into a bitter feud with Republican officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, after they rejected his false claims of election fraud. Last year, a grand jury in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, returned an indictment against Mr. Trump for his efforts to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory that led to the mug shot of a glowering former president. (Not that all Republicans minded: Hours before Mr. Trump took the stage in Duluth on Wednesday, the right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson thanked Georgia for “the greatest mug shot in the history of the world.”)