President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama held rallies in Georgia within days of each other, supporting opposing candidates in two closely watched midterm elections in the battleground state.
Trump rallied at the Guardian Centers in Perry on Saturday to support Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson and U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins. Obama joined Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms at a rally in Morrow on Wednesday.
Photos and videos from both events offer a glimpse of the crowds that came to hear Trump and Obama make their points before Election Day, as the two men traded jabs over their respective leadership.
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Obama’s Georgia rally
Obama joined Ossoff and Bottoms on Wednesday as Democrats sought to mobilize supporters ahead of the midterm elections. Promoted as the United for Georgia Rally, the event was part of Democrats’ efforts to increase participation in two competitive statewide races.
In his remarks, Obama criticized Trump over rising costs and accused him of launching an “unnecessary” war in Iran. He also criticized Trump’s White House renovations.
“He spends time sticking gold medallions on the mantle in the Oval Office,” Obama said. “He’s literally doing art and craft while we fight a war and try to deal with out-of-control prices.”
Obama made similar comments at a rally in Michigan on Saturday for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, saying Trump had “made the White House look like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory.”
Trump responded to those remarks Monday during a campaign stop in Mississippi, defending his decorating choices and saying the White House “represents our country and must be impeccable.”
“I would try to explain this to a guy like Obama, but he wouldn’t understand,” Trump said. “He doesn’t understand that the White House has to be clean, immaculate, beautiful. There can’t be any cracks in the column.”
Trump’s rally in Georgia
Trump held his rally Saturday as he campaigned for Jackson and Collins, who are seeking to win the governorship and unseat Ossoff, respectively.
During the event, Trump criticized Obama’s stop in Michigan earlier in the day, saying the crowd had been small.
“You know, I saw that Barack Hussein Obama was in Michigan and the place was empty,” Trump told the crowd. “And they were like, ‘Oh, it’s a big crowd coming, people are flocking’ – they don’t talk about my crowds, they never talk about them.”
What the photos show
Photos from the Obama rally showed supporters gathered inside the Southlake Arena in Morrow. The venue can accommodate 8,000 people, according to its official website, although its capacity does not indicate how many people will be in attendance on Wednesday.
At Trump’s rally in Perry on Saturday, photographs showed supporters filling the seats.
The seats were full more than an hour before Trump took the stage, and a few hundred people stood behind them, according to The Mercer centerMercer’s student newspaper. FOX 5 Atlanta also described the event as crowded, but venue officials have not released an official attendance estimate.
News week contacted Guardian Centers and The Arena at Southlake for attendance estimates.
Neither gathering had a verified final attendance figure in the sources examined. Although photos and local reports provide insight into attendance at both events, they cannot establish which gathering attracted the largest crowd.
Georgia poll
The rallies came as Georgia voters prepared to decide competitive races for governor and U.S. Senate.
The RealClearPolitics polling average shows Ossoff leading Collins by 8.2 percentage points, 51.2 percent to 43 percent. The latest poll included in the average, conducted by Quantus Insights October 15-17, shows Ossoff leading 52 to 45 percent among 755 likely voters, with a margin of error of 3.8 percentage points.
An earlier poll of 1,000 likely Georgia voters by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from October 7 to 15, Ossoff led Collins, 48 percent to 40 percent, with nearly 12 percent undecided. The poll had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
The same AJC The poll found that the gubernatorial race between Bottoms and Jackson fell within the poll’s margin of error, with Jackson receiving 46 percent support and Bottoms 45 percent. Eight percent of likely voters remained undecided.
Record turnout for in-person early voting continued Wednesday, with more than 2,203,600 voters casting ballots statewide as of Wednesday evening, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.
Early voting continues in Georgia through Friday.
Newsweek Reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors about this story: Jenna deJong And Edward T. Cummins
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