PHILADELPHIA — Moments before the first debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump ended late Tuesday, the Democrat’s advisers sent word her campaign wanted a second one.

It was a tacit acknowledgment that as well as she might have performed in her showdown against Trump — even Republicans such as U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said the former president struggled — the debate might have a muted impact on the tight race in Georgia and other battlegrounds.

With the TV spectacle of the first faceoff between the two candidates over, the spotlight returns to old-fashioned campaigning as both candidates return to the trail.

After swinging through the state earlier this month, Harris’ latest bus tour skirts Georgia while hitting other competitive states. Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance will headline a conservative gala in Atlanta next week.

But analysts and activists expect more attention trained on Georgia as campaigns brace for another nail-biter four years after Joe Biden narrowly flipped the state on his way to winning the presidency.

“We’re going to continue to do exactly what the vice president did tonight, which is put in the work and get across the country speaking to voters,” said Quentin Fulks, Harris’ Georgia-bred deputy campaign manager.

Republicans, too, say they’re entering a new phase with early voting in Georgia set to begin in scarcely a month. Georgia GOP Chair Josh McKoon said Trump’s campaign is renewing efforts to bank as many votes from loyalists early so staffers and volunteers can focus on squishier voters less likely to rush to the polls.

“We have run in the past like a football team that says we aren’t going to play offense in the first three quarters of the game and then we are going to try to play lights-out football in the final 15 minutes,” he said. “We don’t want a University of Georgia head football coach that played the game that way, and we don’t want a Republican Party that runs campaigns that way.”

Georgia Democrats, too, are stepping up their get-out-the-vote efforts as they work to extend a burst of energy behind Harris that began seven weeks ago when Biden withdrew from the race and carried over to the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago.

“We were really excited coming out of the convention, but once I got home and a week or two passed I felt like the energy had died down a bit,” said former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, a top adviser to both Biden and Harris.

“It was almost like we were in church,” Bottoms said. “We got the choir excited, but there’s a bunch of people on the street that we needed to bring into the congregation.”

Credit: Seeger Gray/AJC

Credit: Seeger Gray/AJC

The challenge for Democrats now, Bottoms said, is crashing through a glut of TV ads, text messages and other campaign clamor that competes for the attention of undecided or unenthusiastic voters.

She marveled that Trump’s campaign was even targeting her 22-year-old son with twice-daily messaging. Democrats, she said, need to step up their efforts to match the GOP din.

“It’s great to be excited,” she said of the party’s energy after the convention. “But if people don’t go to vote, then we just had a really good party.”

‘This is not over’

The debate marked another milestone on the trail, though one less momentous than the Atlanta showdown in June that hastened Biden’s departure from the race.

Throughout the 90-minute face-off on Tuesday, Harris tried to burrow under Trump’s skin, sometimes using Georgia-themed examples to knock him on the defensive.

She repeatedly called Trump a “disgrace,” questioned his mental fitness, said world leaders sneered at him behind his back and invited voters to attend his rallies to see for themselves how “extreme” his policies are.

And when Trump falsely claimed he won Georgia’s 2020 vote — multiple recounts upheld Biden’s narrow victory — the Democrat countered he was “fired by 81 million people.”

Credit: AP

“We cannot afford to have a president in the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election,” she said.

Trump tried several times to pivot to immigration policy, an issue that regularly polls among the top concerns of likely GOP voters in Georgia. But he also often angrily lashed out at Harris with personal attacks that some of his supporters worried could alienate independent voters.

He claimed Biden secretly “hates” his vice president and called Democrats “weak and pathetic.” At times, he went further.

“She’s a Marxist,” he said during one heated exchange over economic policy. “Everybody knows she’s a Marxist.”

Some GOP leaders praised his sharp-elbowed approach, while others saw the debate as a missed opportunity. Audrey Haynes, a University of Georgia political scientist, framed Trump’s performance as a straight-up play to the party’s base rather than an appeal to the middle of the electorate.

“This is not going to bring in new voters to his coalition,” she said. “I would think he doesn’t get a bump of any kind from this debate performance, and Harris could potentially get a very small one.”

That raises the stakes for a potential second debate, still an uncertain prospect. Republican state Sen. Jason Anavitarte said Trump would be wise to commit to a sequel.

“I don’t think the first debate changes the fundamentals of the race,” said Anavitarte, who represents a slice of Paulding County. “This is not over by any stretch of the imagination.”

Staff writers Tia Mitchell and David Wickert contributed to this article.