Will Trump return to the White House? The state of Georgia could decide

Republican presidential nominee, former US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 15. Getty Images / AFP

In the words of the old song, I have Georgia on my mind. That’s because we are in the endgame of the US presidential election, and Georgia probably holds the key to the White House.

It’s one of half a dozen pivotal states that will dictate whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris becomes president in January. The polls suggest that Georgia – and indeed the result – will be a toss-up.

But Georgia is on my mind for another reason, too. It is the state where the fault lines in American society and culture broke apart four years ago. As a result, Mr Trump still faces the most extraordinary criminal charges ever levelled against an American president – that he, in effect, tried to steal the 2020 election.

Donald Trump looks on as Kamala Harris' face appears as a video plays on a screen, during a rally in Detroit, Michigan, US, October 18. Reuters

In the equivalent of political judo, Mr Trump continues to accuse his opponents of precisely that alleged crime – stealing the 2020 election. But the events in Georgia continue to haunt Mr Trump himself. That’s because in an irate (and recorded) telephone call with one of the state’s officials four years ago – an official who happens to be a fellow Republican – Mr Trump demanded that he “find” 11,000 or so votes.

If those votes could be “found”, then Mr Trump could claim to have won the state and hence the presidency that year. The votes did not exist. Yet Mr Trump continued to argue that his “Maga” faithful should “stop the steal” of the election, and as history records, the result was the unprecedented violence at the US Capitol in January 2021.

Trump demanded that he “find” 11,000. These events are well remembered in Georgia, and they are a live issue now as voters across the US are already voting

These events are well remembered in Georgia, and they are a live issue now as voters across the US are already voting for their next president. It could mean a return of Mr Trump to the White House.

That telephone call from January 2021 to Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State for Georgia, was part of Mr Trump’s campaign, as he put it, to assert publicly that “this is a fraud on the American public” and “frankly, we did win this election”. The official count showed that Mr Trump was 11,800 votes short of Joe Biden in the state.

Mr Trump’s recording is worth listening to. He says, very clearly, to Mr Raffensperger: “I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” The official politely declines.

Mr Raffensperger did nothing other than his duty as a decent public official and was re-elected to his office by Georgian voters in 2022, defeating a Trump-supported candidate. As a result, history records that Mr Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 presidential election and therefore lost the presidency.

The big question is whether, in this knife-edge state, voters will again side with the Democratic party candidate. And if so, will Mr Trump pursue once more the highly damaging “stop the steal” rhetoric about election fraud that continues to divide America? We shall see.

For now, the American courts have moved at a glacial pace in the criminal cases against the former president. Some of the charges have been dismissed, although Mr Trump still faces eight charges out of the original 13. Yet it’s not clear when, or given the precarious outcome of next month’s election, whether at all these charges will proceed to a trial.

As some American commentators suggest, in this extraordinary election, a few thousand pivotal voters in the great state of Georgia could decide whether Mr Trump will return to the White House next year, or to the courthouse, and even potentially to the jailhouse.

At least the civil cases have been clearer. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News claimed (falsely) that voting machines and equipment used in the 2020 Georgia voting and operated by a company called Dominion were in some way faulty. Dominion sued. Fox settled. It paid Dominion a reported $787 million in damages.

Usher moves onstage during a campaign event for Democratic presidential nominee and US Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta, Georgia, October 19. Reuters

What we do know is that Georgian voters are already voting early. Ms Harris has been in the state supported by, among others, the R&B singer Usher. All the recent polls suggest that the key states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and others – are statistically “too close to call”. Turnout therefore is the key.

Georgia was, of course, also the cradle of the Confederacy. The famous civil war film Gone with the Wind was set in Clayton County on the outskirts of Atlanta. Mr Trump once wondered aloud why American filmmakers do not make movies like Gone with the Wind anymore. If you watch it nowadays, as I have done, you will understand why.

The film opens with happy black slaves in the so-called Deep South working for rich white owners on a landed estate bathed in a golden sunset. It’s an American fiction about a violently divided, brutal society. At the end of the civil war, then president Abraham Lincoln insisted that America should “bind up the nation’s wounds”.

The wounds in America are very different in 2024 from those Lincoln faced in the 1860s. The big question is whether the 2024 election will heal those wounds or re-open them.