Trump and Vance head to battleground Georgia looking to put recent struggles behind them

(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance are set to rally supporters Saturday in Georgia, a battleground state that has taken on new importance in the wake of the shake-up on the Democratic ticket.

Earlier this week, Atlanta symbolized exactly how much the race had changed since President Joe Biden stepped aside and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic nominee.

After she’d locked up the support of party delegates and announced that she’d raised more than $200 million in her first week as a candidate, Harris rallied 10,000 supporters in the city’s Georgia State University Convocation Center, telling them that her path to the White House ran through the Peach State.

Trump and Vance will campaign in the same venue Saturday, but without the fundraising spike, increased momentum or improved chances of winning a crucial state.

Biden became the first Democrat to win Georgia in nearly 30 years when he beat Trump by just under 12,000 votes in 2020.

Trump was indicted last year by a Georgia grand jury on charges surrounding his efforts to overturn the results of that election, including a call asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the exact number of votes he needed to win.

But, up until two weeks ago, Georgia – along with the other Sun Belt states of North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada – appeared to be drifting toward Trump, who was coming off a successful Republican convention with a new running mate. Polls were showing him ahead and suggested that his campaign’s effort to chip away at Biden’s support among Black voters, specifically young men, was bearing fruit.

Now, however, the Harris campaign has argued that she is appealing to Black, Latino and younger voters in a way that could broaden the map beyond the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

A new landscape

As Democrats rallied around Harris over the past two weeks, the Trump campaign has struggled as it seeks to figure out how to talk about Harris and justify Vance’s place on the ticket as the Ohio senator faces more scrutiny.

Republican leaders have warned party members to keep their criticisms of Harris focused on policy, not race or gender, after several Republican lawmakers called her a “DEI hire,” using the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump campaign appeared to be pushing a similar focused message, spending more than $12 million this week on ads tying Harris to the current administration’s handling of border security, with a tagline calling her “dangerously liberal.”

But when the former president appeared at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday, he shocked the Chicago audience and many of the Black voters he is seeking to appeal to when he falsely claimed that Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, “happened to turn Black” suddenly to court voters.

Those remarks have been met with exasperation from many Republicans – who just two weeks ago had been touting a message of party unity following the Republican convention.

“I think what the country would hope for – certainly what I’m hoping for in the campaign – is a discussion on the issues and the polices,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told CNN’s Manu Raju this week. “You’ve got two campaigns that are presenting very, very different views on these issues. So, let’s talk about the issues.”

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally, said the campaign should focus on drawing policy contrasts.

“I’ve known the vice president for a while – she’s always embraced her heritage proudly, as she should,” Graham told CNN. “My problem with Vice President Harris is the policy choices she’s made.”

Trump, however, is not shying away from the controversial and false claims about Harris’ heritage. Instead, he has doubled and tripled down, posting online and amplifying further conspiracy theories regarding her identity.

A senior Trump campaign official told CNN that the campaign would not “shy away” from the former president’s comments. Rather it plans to use them as a new line of attack framed around Harris being a “phony.”

“You can expect similar messaging in Atlanta,” the adviser said.

Meanwhile, Vance backed Trump up while campaigning in Arizona this week, using the “phony” line against Harris and claiming that she “caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”

The Ohio senator’s defense of Trump comes after the campaign has spent weeks pushing back on criticisms of Vance’s past comments arguing that people with children should have more voting power and dismissing women without kids as “childless cat ladies.”

Weeks ago, Vance’s selection was seen as a play to the MAGA base and a youthful counterbalance – Vance turned 40 on Friday – to Biden and his age-related struggles.

But with Biden gone, and Vance’s history of making disparaging remarks about childless people coming to light, the campaign has already sought to reintroduce him two weeks after his primetime convention debut.

CNN’s Alayna Treene, Manu Raju and Morgan Rimmer contributed to this report.

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