Former President Donald Trump is headlining a get out the vote rally this weekend in Georgia, ahead of the state’s Presidential Primary next week.
The rally will be held in Rome on Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Forum River Center.
Georgia’s Primary is held one week after Super Tuesday. March 12 is the earliest that Trump could clinch his party’s nomination and be officially declared the “presumptive nominee,” according to The Associated Press. President Joe Biden could nab that official title a week later, though both men are expected to earn their respective party nominations.
Trump’s rally comes the same day Biden will also be in the Peach State. He has a visit planned in the Atlanta area, though no details have yet been released, according to local station Fox 5.
Georgia is now considered one of the most important battlegrounds in the nation for the General Election, so the Trump and Biden visits may be less about drumming up support in the Primary as they are about securing support for the General Election.
Biden carried Georgia over Trump in 2020, a victory the former President famously challenged and continues to falsely claim was fraudulent. Biden won the state by just shy of 12,000 votes, a narrow victory of just 0.2 percentage points.
Now, things aren’t looking so positive for the Democratic incumbent. Nearly every poll of the Peach State shows Trump with an edge, if not a solid lead. A Morning Consult Poll commissioned by Bloomberg in mid-February puts Trump 6 points ahead of Biden. When adding third-party candidates to the mix — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jill Stein and Cornel West — Trump leads by 7 percentage points.
An Emerson College Poll from The Hill and Nexstar taken around the same time put Trump up 9 points over the incumbent.
But for those still hoping Biden will bow out of the race, potential replacements on the ballot fare worse in Georgia. The same Emerson College poll put Trump 18 percentage points ahead of California Gov. Gavin Newsom in a hypothetical General Election matchup, while Trump led Vice President Kamala Harris by 10 percentage points.
While Biden carried Georgia narrowly in 2020, Trump won the state in 2016 when he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
