Behind the Curtain: Trump's devil-in-Georgia problem

Yet Trump himself has made this make-or-break state dramatically more breakable by torching its popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, bluntly and repeatedly.

• "He's a bad guy. He's a disloyal guy. And he's a very average governor," Trump said earlier this month at a rally in ... wait for it ... Atlanta!
• "Little Brian, little Brian Kemp," Trump continued. "Bad guy."
• It's like the state brings out the worst in Trump, some advisers bemoan. "It's petty self-indulgence," a source close to Trump told us.

What's even more shocking: Trump lived and learned this exact lesson in 2020 — when his personal grudge with Kemp cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate. Oh, it also helped cost him reelection: Trump lost the state by 12,000 votes in 2020 — the first Georgia loss for Republicans since 1992.

• So when you read stories about Trump's own advisers privately fretting about his self-destructive behavior, that's precisely what they mean. They need to squeeze every vote out of Georgia to avoid a repeat of 2020.

The big picture: Polling out yesterday from the N.Y. Times and Siena College shows Harris opening a Sun Belt route through the fast-growing, diverse states of Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. That gives her an alternative to the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which were President Biden's only plausible path.

• Harris narrowed Trump's lead among likely voters in Georgia to 4 points (50% to 46%, with a margin of error of ±4.4 points). In the Times-Siena poll in May, Trump enjoyed a 9-point Georgia lead.

Between the lines: Harris' rise in the state is partly, but not entirely, due to Black voters, who make up one-third of the state's electorate.

• Harris is also a more effective messenger on reproductive rights in a state with a controversial ban on abortions after about six weeks.
• A top Democratic operative told us Harris "is just a much better fit than Biden for the Georgia electorate, which has younger and more Black voters. Much easier to see Stacey Abrams and [Sen. Raphael] Warnock firing up the pews" for Harris than for Biden.

Behind the scenes: We hear Kemp has grown increasingly worried Trump could lose the state by alienating too many moderate Republicans.

• Kemp isn't sleeping on this, despite being called names: Look for him to shore up the state GOP's get-out-the-vote operation in an effort to rescue Trump.

What we're hearing: The Trump campaign gets the plot, and is spending heavily to try to offset Trump's attacks on Kemp and his wife, Marty. ("Atlanta is like a killing field and your governor ought to get off his ass and do something about it," Trump told the Atlanta rally.)

• As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Trump's campaign and biggest aligned super PAC spent four times as much on TV ads in the Peach State in the two weeks after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee than in the rest of 2024 combined.
• Of the $37 million in ad buys the Trump campaign has placed over the next week or so, almost $24 million (65%) are in Georgia, Democratic campaign strategist Doug Sosnik points out in The New York Times.

By the numbers: The growing urgency of Georgia can also be seen in the Trump campaign's long-range ad buys. The Trump campaign's share of TV spending planned in Georgia doubled from 21% in August to 43% in September and 46% in October, according to calculations for Axios by the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

• In fact, Trump has placed advance ad buys for this fall in only two states. Wait for it ... Pennsylvania and Georgia.
• The campaign is sure to add to those reservations. But it's an illuminating window into current priorities.

Being there: With Biden in the race, presidential politics were relatively quiet in Georgia. One Trump confidant even told us he thought Georgia would be off the list of swing states by Election Day. Atlanta's biggest story of the summer was a water main break that left a large part of the city under a boil water advisory for five days.

• Now the election is flooding the airwaves. Atlanta residents watching local NBC affiliate 11 Alive on Friday morning would've seen 17 ads about the presidential race — and all were about Harris, according to Medium Buying.
• Of the 17, nine were from the Harris campaign touting her record on the economy and border security. Eight were from Trump-affiliated groups blasting Harris on the border and as a "radical."

The other side: The Harris-Walz campaign took a victory lap on its Sun Belt gains yesterday, as it announced plans to spend "at least $370 million on digital and television advertising between Labor Day and Election Day" — "on top of what the campaign believes to be the largest digital reservation in the history of American politics at more than $200 million."

• "After we went up with a significant buy in North Carolina last month, the Trump campaign was forced to go up on the air in a state where they had not been spending at all," the memo says. "We've also forced the Trump campaign to significantly increase its spending in Georgia, after poll after poll showed the Vice President gaining."

Axios Atlanta's Jen Ashley, Kristal Dixon and Thomas Wheatley contributed reporting.