Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear hopped atop the bed of a Dodge Ram 1500 in Atlanta’s northern suburbs on Sunday and glanced at the crowd of hundreds, some attending their first Democratic event, who had gathered to see him.

“This is not my first speech on the back of a pickup truck,” he said, smiling, to cheers from the audience, splayed out in the parking lot outside of a new campaign office for Vice President Kamala Harris in a redbrick Forsyth County complex.

“If you don’t know me, I’m the guy that last November beat Mitch McConnell’s hand-picked candidate,” he said of his reelection victory over the Senate GOP leader’s choice. “And I’m the guy who beat Donald Trump’s hand-picked candidate.”

The second-term Democrat could soon have another calling card. With Harris’ lightning-quick ascension to the top of the ticket last week, she now has days to select a running mate. And Beshear is one of a handful of leading candidates for the post.

To Beshear’s backers, he can appeal to blue-collar workers, as well as rural voters who have long scorned national Democrats. Beshear has twice won the top job in Kentucky, a state so solidly Republican that Joe Biden only captured two of its 120 counties in 2020.

It’s one reason the campaign deployed him Sunday to Forsyth County, a quintessential Republican stronghold where Democrats have struggled to make inroads. Many locals said they’ve never seen such a crowd at a Democratic event here.

Trump and Vance team up to campaign in Minnesota

As the presidential campaign enters a critical final 100 day stretch, Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, rallied supporters on Saturday in a state that hasn’t backed a GOP candidate for the White House since 1972.

Trump spoke for more than an hour and a half to cheering crowds holding signs supporting police.

Trump, who won Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 only to lose them four years later, has increasingly focused on Minnesota as a state where he’d like to put Democrats on defense.

Source: The Associated Press

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“We used to feel like we were undercover. We still have to be cautious. But eight years ago, a group like this wouldn’t have gathered,” said Lynne Nielsen, a retired educator in Forsyth, who added: “We are getting louder and prouder.”

Beshear also has emerged as a formidable critic of U.S. Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s newly christened running mate. He has bashed Vance as a “phony” who doesn’t represent the Appalachian region, saying Vance may have family in Kentucky but “he ain’t from here.”

On Sunday, he took his criticism a step further by mentioning how Trump, at a weekend rally in Florida, again resorted to name-calling by labeling Harris a “bum.”

“If he wants to see a bum, he ought to look in a mirror. And what he’ll see looking back are multiple bankruptcies and 34 felony convictions,” Beshear said of a New York jury’s May guilty verdict against Trump on hush money charges.

Then he added: “JD Vance looks in the mirror, he doesn’t see any conviction at all.”

‘Redouble our efforts’

At first blush, Forsyth County, 40 miles out from downtown Atlanta, might seem a strange place to open a Democratic campaign office — and bring a marquee speaker like Beshear.

It’s a reliably Republican county that no Democratic nominee has carried since Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Biden couldn’t capture a third of the vote here four years ago.

But Democrats have made marginal gains in Forsyth and other fast-growing exurban areas over the last decade, capitalizing on demographic shifts as liberal-leaning voters from Atlanta and beyond push toward the metro region’s outer limits.

Trump captured 71% of the county’s vote in 2016 and about 66% in 2020. Local Democrats say they aim to keep him closer to 60% in Forsyth this November, part of a strategy to narrow the margins in other deep-red counties across the state.

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“There are plenty of Democratic votes to win here. We have a long way to go to be a blue county, but we’re not an 80-20 county anymore,” said Becky Woomer, one of the county’s most influential Democratic activists.

“We’re on the same path as Gwinnett,” she said of the neighboring county, which transformed from a GOP stronghold to a Democratic bastion in the last eight years. “And it’s driven by women fed up with seeing their rights chipped away.”

Democrats here are confident that Harris’ ascension as the presumptive nominee has changed the electoral landscape in Georgia, giving them new hope of repeating Biden’s 2020 win in November. She will headline an event in Atlanta Tuesday, one of her first stops since Biden withdrew from the race.

Forsyth Republicans have ratcheted up their mobilizing efforts, too. The local GOP this week held a grassroots training program that attracted dozens of volunteers. Organizers have used the spike in Democratic enthusiasm over Harris to galvanize conservatives.

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“No matter who the Democrats nominate, we need to redouble our efforts to get out the vote,” the Forsyth GOP urged supporters.

Former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, a Trump ally who once represented parts of Forsyth in Congress, warned local Republicans that too much was at stake to let off the gas.

He also mocked Democrats for switching their allegiance to Harris so quickly, even though Biden overwhelmingly won the party’s primaries earlier this year.

“If he’s coming to explain to any Democrats why their primary votes were a waste of pesky ‘democracy,’ he could have just sent a note,” said Collins.

‘In my DNA’

Just as in 2022, Democrats argue a key to November success is mobilizing voters infuriated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Beshear and the other finalists to be Harris’ political partner — a group of mostly white men who hold statewide office in key states — have each campaigned on their support for abortion rights.

On Sunday, Beshear was joined by Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky abortion rights activist who delivered an emotional address about her tumultuous childhood. She spoke about being sexually abused by her stepfather a day after Roe was reversed and has since been featured in ads for Beshear and Biden.

She said she tells skeptical voters who have long cast ballots for Republicans not to see support for Harris as a “vote for the Democrats, but a vote for public education, a vote for women’s rights, a vote for your daughters, a vote for your granddaughters.”

“There is just so much at stake that even if your economic beliefs might align in another way, your human beliefs and your moral beliefs should follow the Democrats,” she said.

As for Beshear, he wouldn’t say what his future holds. Nor did he mention the other potential contenders at the center of running-mate buzz: North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. But he said he was “honored” to be in the conversation.

“Kentucky is in my DNA, and this is a dream job to serve our people,” he said. “The only reason I’d ever consider anything else is if I could help Kentucky more and if we could take a little bit of what we’ve done in Kentucky and spread it around the U.S.”