Georgia Democrats tried to energize supporters grappling with the FBI’s disclosure that it was looking into a potential new trove of messages from Hillary Clinton’s private email server, hoping to capitalize on a “souls to the polls” movement Sunday to mobilize voters from the church pews to voting sites.
Sensing the FBI’s announcement could give Donald Trump’s struggling campaign a new lease on life, giddy Republicans countered with their own weekend get-out-the-vote efforts. Hundreds of GOP volunteers knocked on doors Saturday, a mandatory weekend voting day ahead of the Nov. 8 election.
The frenzy underscored the latest October “surprise” to surface in the closing days of the race between Clinton and Trump in Georgia, which a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll showed was locked in a statistical dead heat. With polls showing Clinton’s lead shrinking over Trump, some Democrats said it was clear she could no longer coast to victory.
“Push through the negative rhetoric of this election cycle and remember not who is on the ballot, but what is: health care. Criminal justice reform. And voting rights itself,” said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who led a bus caravan that unloaded dozens of parishioners from Ebenezer Baptist Church to a south Fulton voting site.
Clinton and her allies have lashed out at the FBI and its director, James Comey, for disclosing less than two weeks before the election that it had discovered new emails possibly relevant to an investigation of her handling of confidential information on a private email server while she was secretary of state.
On the campaign trail on Saturday and Sunday, she accused Comey of violating Justice Department rules by disclosing the details so close to the vote and called on him to release more specific information. Clinton called the timing of the release “deeply troubling,” noting that Comey four months ago recommended no criminal charges.
‘He will take us back’
Trump and his top allies exulted in the new development, casting the FBI investigation as another scandal clouding her campaign. In an interview, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the development the “final nail in the coffin” for the Democrat’s campaign and said a victory would be marred by Nixon-esque questions from the start.
“If she were by some miracle to win – or anti-miracle, I should say – none of these people are going to accept that. None of these people are going to say, ‘I guess she wasn’t a crook, I guess she wasn’t a liar,’” Gingrich told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, adding: “A vote for Hillary is a vote for four years of constant investigation.”
As Clinton’s supporters worried that the FBI’s investigation would complicate her efforts to win over skeptical Georgia voters, they sought to make the most of Sunday voting. It was the first time in a presidential election contest that polls were open on a Sunday in Georgia.
The rapper 2 Chainz joined Warnock and Rep. John Lewis at one of the busiest polling sites in the state, at the Adamsville Recreation Center in heavily Democratic southwest Fulton County, to urge voters to cast their ballots early. Before they cast their ballots, an 11-year-old girl asked Lewis what would happen if Trump prevailed.
“Our country will not be the same,” Lewis answered. “Donald Trump is mean-spirited. And he will take us back to another place, another time.”
Authorities opened the polls to voters on Sunday for the first time in 2014, and more than 12,000 ballots were cast during that election. Democrats hope to boost that total this year, including a plan to bus at least 300 voters from Ebenezer to the polls after services Sunday.
Some Republicans have called for a ban on Sunday voting, casting it as an unfair advantage for Democrats, but the plan never gained traction in the Legislature. This year at least eight counties, many of them Democratic strongholds, have opened their polls on Sunday: Chatham, Clayton, DeKalb, Dougherty, Fulton, Henry, Muscogee and Richmond.
‘He won’t give up’
At the Adamsville site, voters were welcomed by activists waving signs that read: “Talk the talk, now walk the walk.” Many of the voters interviewed Sunday — who overwhelmingly supported Clinton — were dismissive of the FBI disclosure and ready for the election to be over.
“It’s her time time and it’s time to try something new,” said Milton Aaron, an Atlanta resident who works as a cashier. “That FBI stuff is just propaganda that’s trying to deter people. I’m not worried about it at all - people have already made up their minds.”
More than 16 million ballots have already been cast — including about 1 million in Georgia — and Clinton’s supporters hope the news about the FBI investigation is too late to do any lasting damage to her bid. But they worry it could sap down-ticket interest in competitive congressional races around the nation, including the Senate battle in Georgia between Republican Johnny Isakson and his challengers, Democrat Jim Barksdale and Libertarian Allen Buckley.
Many Republicans, long distrustful of talk that Georgia could turn blue, saw the FBI disclosure as reason to cheer. Gingrich said the federal agency’s probe, along with hacked Clinton campaign emails released by Wikileaks, guarantee questions about her ethics won’t go away even if she wins in November.
Jim Voyles, a retired real estate developer in Sandy Springs, was among the 100 or so Republicans who gathered at the Fulton County GOP’s headquarters to make calls for Trump on Saturday. He said he sensed a new sense of confidence among the New York businessman’s backers.
“What I see now is that the Clintons are finally getting caught at their own game,” said Voyles. “She’s not smart enough to figure out that it’s her own doing that’s ruining her campaign. We know she’ll put some lie out there to try to spoil it. But Trump – he won’t give up.”
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