In 2020, when Biden became the first Democratic Presidential candidate to flip Georgia in twenty-eight years, he won two counties in the southeastern part of the state: Chatham County, in which Savannah is situated, and nearby Liberty County, home to Hinesville and Fort Stewart, a large Army base. Both counties lean Democratic, have significant populations of Black voters, and are partially rural. At the rally, I spoke with Micah Smith, a retired Army veteran and L.G.B.T.Q. activist from Hinesville who ran to be a representative in the Georgia State House in the 2022 Democratic primary. (She lost to the incumbent.) Smith, who is trans, stood in the front row draped in a pride flag and expressed confidence that Harris would do more for women’s rights and reproductive rights than Biden had. “This is the first time since I started voting, in 1998, that I’m voting for the best candidate for the office and not the lesser of two evils,” she said. “I really appreciate her promise to fight limits on bodily autonomy and her standing against Trump and his promise to turn off gender-affirming care for veterans.”
One couple, who had driven to the rally from South Carolina, showed me a photograph of a tournament bracket they had drawn on a paper towel during the primary debates for the 2020 election, which predicted that Harris would take the Democratic nomination. “When Biden said that he was stepping down and supporting Harris, it was, like, ‘Oh, my God. This is like a prediction coming true,’ ” Catherine Forester, of Beaufort, told me. “I kept the napkin in a drawer,” her partner, Kevin Prentice, said.
“Warnock won the state twice,” Katherine Simmons, a stay-at-home mother of three in Savannah, told me, referring to Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Atlanta who won a special election in 2021 and a full term in 2022. She mentioned an increase in the construction of warehouses along the Georgia seacoast, and the resulting controversy over development. “Rural counties are going through a lot of changes with our government selling out their way of life to big warehouses and foreign companies,” she said. “I think people are just picking their heads up out of the sand and asking, Who are the people that are going to represent us?”
Harris was introduced by Katelyn Green, the president of the Student Government Association of Savannah State University, a historically Black school. Harris did not speak of warehouses along the Georgia coast, or of any particularly local issues. Her speech—in which she thanked Georgians for delivering the state for Biden in 2020 and urged attendees not to pay attention to the polls “because we are running as the underdogs”—was disrupted twice by individuals protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The first of these provoked not boos exactly but a kind of generalized clamor that temporarily drowned out Harris’s words. “I am speaking now, but, on the subject, I will say this,” she said, as the protester was led away. “The President and I are working around the clock. We have got to get a hostage deal done and get a ceasefire done now.”
A few days later, after a Labor Day rally with union members in Detroit, Harris was back in another semi-rural area, this time for a rally in North Hampton, a small town outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Like Georgia, New Hampshire’s statewide elected officials are a mix of Republicans (the governor) and Democrats (senators), and both houses of its state legislature have Republican majorities. Unlike in Georgia, a Republican Presidential candidate has not won the state since 2000. Over the weekend, the Boston Globe had reported that a top Trump-campaign volunteer from Massachusetts had been let go after sending out an e-mail declaring that “the campaign has determined that New Hampshire is no longer a battleground state.” Trump-campaign officials denied that he had given up on the state, which he has not visited since January.
The Harris rally, where she planned to announce a series of policy proposals to support small businesses, was being held at Throwback Brewery, a woman-owned restaurant and beer-maker on a twelve-acre farm with chickens, goats, and a hop yard. A gleaming white repurposed barn was decorated with red, white, and blue bunting and covered in solar panels. The campaign staff member checking in the press wore a T-shirt with a photograph of Tim Walz cradling a small pig.
As for the local population demographics, the crowd at the rally was older and more white than the one in Georgia had been, and many attendees looked as if they were dressed for a hike. The mood was positive but more subdued, perhaps because people in New Hampshire are used to being campaigned to. The rally was being held outside, and attendees waited under the midday sun, drinking free lemonade or iced tea or one of the beers being sold out of a truck. In a state whose motto is “Live Free or Die,” nearly everyone I spoke with said that their primary concern was reproductive rights. “I have a friend who just had a miscarriage, but she couldn’t get care. She’s in Texas right now, and I think that’s a really scary issue,” an attendee named Becca Oney told me. She said she has at times leaned to the right politically, particularly on the issue of gun rights, in part because of her upbringing in rural Ohio. “We could take our guns to school,” she said. “Everybody got the first day of hunting season off if you wanted.”
Cell-phone coverage at the rally was almost nonexistent, and so there was a collective gasp of shock from the audience when Harris, after being introduced by Nicole Carrier, the brewery’s co-owner, spoke of the news of the shooting that had happened that morning at a school in Winder, Georgia. “Our kids are sitting in a classroom where they should be fulfilling their God-given potential, and some part of their big, beautiful brain is concerned about a shooter busting through the door of the classroom,” Harris said, from behind bulletproof glass surrounding the speaker podium. “It does not have to be this way.”
