Can Harris energise rural voters in final stretch of US election?

Peach County, Georgia – Curtis Plant's family has been farming for as long as he can remember. Or as his cousin, Horace Amica, described it: "Ever since I've known myself."

Walking through a stretch of their farm, tucked within the groves of peach and pecan trees that blanket the county, the pair recounted the difficulty of a life in agriculture, particularly as Black men in the rural south of the United States.

Farmers like him, Plant said, are "fading out".

"The money's not there for them," he explained. "So only the big farms can survive."

But as Plant surveyed his rows of collard greens — and the soil where he planned to soon plant okra, peas and turnips — he struck a note of optimism.

"I think Harris can help that," he said, with a nod to Vice President Kamala Harris, one of two major candidates in the November 5 presidential race.

It may be a welcome sentiment for the Harris campaign, which has increasingly sought to mobilise rural voters, particularly in key swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania.

And Peach County, where Plant's farm is located, is seen as an important prize.

Located in central Georgia, Peach County has gained a reputation as a bellwether: It correctly predicted the winner four times in the last five presidential elections, only erring in 2020, when the county went to Republican Donald Trump by about 600 votes.

Now Trump is in the last stretch of his latest campaign, and both he and Harris, the Democratic candidate, have made repeated visits to Georgia.

In the crazed final days of the race, voters like Plant realise life moves a bit slower in the farmlands of Peach County. But success here could portend a national victory.

For Plant, his support for Harris began during the administration of US President Joe Biden, when Congress authorised $5bn in debt relief and aid to Black farmers who had faced historical discrimination.

That measure quickly faced legal challenges. But a workaround was passed in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 that broadened the definition of who could receive the aid, allowing "economically distressed" farmers of other races to participate, too.

Plant has been among the beneficiaries. The 70-year-old motioned to an irrigation system along a stretch of newly turned soil.

"That was paid for with the USDA money," he said, using the acronym for the US Department of Agriculture.

He hopes the tens of thousands of dollars he received will help to build "generational wealth".

Rural counties in Georgia — and indeed, the US as a whole — typically skew Republican and have heavily embraced Trump in his two prior presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020.

But the Harris campaign has been pursuing a two-pronged strategy in battleground states: energise the Democratic base in urban centres, while mitigating losses in more rural areas.

It is an approach that includes outreach to rural Black voters. Peach County is among the areas known as the southern Black Belt. The region was initially named for the fertile ground that made the South an agricultural powerhouse, as well as a locus of slavery.

But it has since become shorthand for the wide swaths of the South where Black communities remain large and exercise significant political power.

These areas have seen increased attention from voter engagement groups this season, after surprising results in the 2020 presidential election. For the first time in 18 years, a majority of Georgia voters picked a Democratic candidate, helping propel Biden to victory.

Hillary Holley, the executive director of the nonprofit Care in Action, which seeks to turn out voters across the state, said the counties south of metropolitan Atlanta — the state capital — will be crucial in the vote.

For example, she noted more Black people voted in southwest Georgia in Raphael Warnock's Senate run-off in January 2021 than they did in the 2020 general election.

"These areas are huge when it comes to the path to victory," she said.

But agricultural workers are only a piece of the puzzle when reaching voters in a place like Peach County, according to LeMario Brown, a farmer who has been active in local politics.

He lives in Fort Valley, the county's largest city, where the largest proportion of Black residents live.

Brown noted that younger generations are less likely to pursue farming, particularly given the dominance of corporate agriculture. During election season, they instead look at basic issues like how the campaigns will help grow jobs, build industries and keep costs down.

“Overall, we're just down-home Southern people," he told Al Jazeera, "trying to make sure we have food on our table and that we are able to take care of our family."

Brown added that in the community, which has a population of just over 28,000, even small campaign gestures can have an outsized impact.

For instance, former President Bill Clinton — an Arkansas native known for his country swagger — visited Fort Valley in October, urging Democrats in the area to repeat the surge at the polls they saw in 2020 when President Biden was elected.

The ex-president also pointed to the recent victories of Democratic Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in 2022 as evidence of the power of the rural vote.

“It’s going to come down to whether you are willing to do one more time what you did when you elected not only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris four years ago, but Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff,” Clinton said at the campaign event, which was styled as a fish fry.

The event, said Brown, "says something about the community, when you have high-stakes people like Bill Clinton willing to come down and spend his time here".

But Peach County — named for the Elberta peach, a variety developed in the area — represents a unique microcosm in Georgia.

It is split nearly evenly between Black and white residents, at about 44 percent apiece, according to 2022 census data.

Anna Holloway, a former professor and dean at Fort Valley State University, wrote a book about moving to the area from the US Midwest in 1968, two years before schools in the county desegregated. She married a Black man there.

But even in the decades afterwards, schools continued to hold segregated events, including separate prom dances. Only in 1990 were the students of Peach County High School allowed to dance together at the same event. Holloway's son was among the first high schoolers to participate in the years that followed.

Though racial divides seem to have eased, the political divide remains entrenched, Holloway explained.

"I would say things are much calmer, and people get along much better," she said. "But there's still a political split. There may be some undecided voters, but they ain't talking."

Speaking from his salon on the main stretch of Fort Valley — a street marked by mostly dormant storefronts — 65-year-old Garrett Milton said there has been a strong tradition of passing down political views across the generations.

"A lot of times when people vote, they vote because of their parents voted," he said. "It's the same with cars. My dad drove a Chevrolet. I drive Chevrolets."

Studies have shown that political views often fall along demographic lines — and have for generations. In April, the Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of non-Hispanic white voters identified with the Republican Party, continuing a decades-long trend towards the right.

Black voters, meanwhile, tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, another longstanding trend that dates back to the 1960s. According to Pew, 83 percent of Black voters signalled their preference for the left-leaning party, compared with 12 percent who tilted Republican.

Still, with a tight race unfolding between Harris and Trump, the outcome is anyone's guess. Milton sees the economy as being one of the deciding factors.

Fort Valley, once bustling, has seen the disappearance of what he called "anchor stores" that drive foot traffic downtown, Milton said. Small businesses like his that rely on regular customers can survive, but others suffer.

But Milton added that Harris's history-making run could generate a level of local enthusiasm not seen since Barack Obama, the first Black president of the US, who won in both 2008 and 2012.

Harris herself would be the first woman and the first person of Black and South Asian descent to win the White House if elected.

"I'm hearing more people saying they're voting more than ever, and I've been here 43 years," Milton said. "But I'm seeing more Trump signs then I've ever seen. They pop up everywhere now."

For his part, Tom Morrill, the former chairman of the Peach County Republican Party, said local conservatives have taken a decidedly pro-Trump turn.

That has put him out of step with fellow Republicans, particularly in the wake of the riot of Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Morrill disagreed with the attempt to disrupt the election certification happening in Congress that day. But he said he and his wife still plan to cast their ballots for Trump.

"My wife said this time she thinks she might throw up," he said. "But she's still going to vote for him."

And while the local undecided voters may not be vocal, Morrill noted that past data shows between 10 percent and 15 percent of the county's population has swung between parties.

"I do think the county could go for Trump, but it's still really hard to tell," he told Al Jazeera. "But I think the economy is going to be the deciding factor here in Peach County."

Brian Doyle, a 31-year-old nurse who cast his ballot for Trump in the nearby city of Byron, said Democrats have an uphill battle reaching voters outside their base.

Even in the last few years, he feels the party has moved away from the social policies conservative-leaning voters could get on board with.

"Democrats have shifted far from their positions. I remember in 2008 Obama was campaigning, and he would say he was pro-traditional marriage," he said, referring to Obama's refusal to endorse same-sex marriage during his first presidential run.

"Rural Georgian voters, they're traditionally conservative. They have Christian values, traditional family values," he said.

He questioned whether the Democrats were ignoring the power of voters in the Bible Belt, a region in the US South named for the density of Christian churches, which includes Peach County.

"The left has left them behind."

Casting their ballots in Fort Valley, brother and sister Johnny Dean and Shirley Penson said they believed residents of the area have felt left behind in other ways, too.

Fort Valley is home to the Blue Bird Corporation bus company, which sells yellow school buses across the country. Many of its residents also work at the nearby Robins Air Force Base.

But otherwise, the pair said, country life can offer few options for young people in search of employment and opportunity.

"It's a nice place to live. It's quiet," said Penson, a retired teacher. "But we're waiting for more businesses to come in. We need more opportunities."

Earlier this year, the announcement that Italian electric car company Imola planned to build a plant in Fort Valley within two years, creating 7,500 jobs, caused some excitement.

"People are ready for a change," Penson said.

But those plans are largely dependent on political tailwinds. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by the Biden administration, created a tax credit for electric vehicles, incentivising investment in the industry.

Trump, however, has pledged to end the credit if elected, in a larger effort to support fossil fuel-powered vehicles.

In the final days of the race, Angela Williams, Plant's niece, has been racing across Peach County and neighbouring areas, hoping to turn out more voters.

A 68-year-old retired civil servant at Robins Air Force Base, Williams has been working in partnership with the Black Voters Matter organisation.

The group does not endorse candidates, but it leads campaigns to mobilise Black voters, through door-knocking, waving signs and engaging with residents whenever possible.

"It makes a difference when people see us, it really does," Williams said. Still, she has noticed that limited interaction with voters translates to limited turnout.

"I found out you have to be persistent," Williams told Al Jazeera, standing under a canopy of pecan trees next to her home. "You can't just say something one time. You have to keep going back."

For his part, Plant offered his prediction for the outcome in the county and maybe — if history is any indication — the country.

"If you grew up in the middle class, I think you can see your likeness [and] some of the things you're going through in Harris," he told Al Jazeera.

"Those are the people who live here. So I think it's gonna go to Harris."