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President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama held rallies in Georgia just days apart, backing opposing candidates in two closely watched midterm races in the battleground state.
Trump rallied at Guardian Centers in Perry on Saturday to support Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson and U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins. Obama joined Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms at a rally in Morrow on Wednesday.
Photos and videos from the two events offer a glimpse of the crowds who turned out to hear Trump and Obama make their cases ahead of Election Day, as the two traded jabs over each other's 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 the Democrats' effort to boost turnout in two competitive statewide races.
In his remarks, Obama took aim at Trump over rising costs and accused him of launching an “unnecessary” war in Iran. He also criticized Trump's White House renovations.
“He is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying 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 has “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump responded to the remarks on Monday during a campaign stop in Mississippi, defending his decor choices and saying the White House “represents our country, and has to be pristine.”
“I would try and explain that to a guy like Obama, but he wouldn't understand,” Trump said. “He doesn't understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful. It can't have cracks in the column.”
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Trump's Georgia Rally
Trump held his rally on 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 that day, claiming the crowd had been small.
“You know, I saw Barack Hussein Obama was in Michigan and the place was empty,” Trump told the crowd. “And they were saying, ‘Oh, this is a large crowd coming, the people are trickling through’—they don't talk about my crowds, they never talk about them.”
What the Photos Show
Photos from Obama's rally showed supporters gathered inside The Arena at Southlake in Morrow. The venue has seating for 8,000 people, according to its official website, though its capacity does not indicate how many attended Wednesday.
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At Trump's rally in Perry on Saturday, photographs showed supporters filling the seating area.
Seats were full more than an hour before Trump took the stage, and a couple hundred people stood behind them, according to The Mercer Cluster, Mercer's student newspaper. FOX 5 Atlanta also described the event as packed, but venue officials had not released an official attendance estimate.
Newsweek has contacted Guardian Centers and The Arena at Southlake for attendance estimates.
Neither rally had a verified final attendance figure available in the sources reviewed. While photos and local reporting provide some insight into turnout at both events, they do not establish which rally drew the larger crowd.
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Georgia Polling
The rallies came as Georgia voters prepared to decide competitive races for governor and the U.S. Senate.
RealClearPolitics' polling average showed Ossoff leading Collins by 8.2 percentage points, at 51.2 percent to 43 percent. The latest poll included in the average, conducted by Quantus Insights from October 15 to 17, found Ossoff leading 52 percent 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 conducted by the University of Georgia's School of Public and International Affairs for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from October 7 and 15 found Ossoff leading 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 poll found the gubernatorial race between Bottoms and Jackson within the poll's margin of error, with Jackson receiving 46 percent support and Bottoms 45 percent. Eight percent of likely voters remained undecided.
Georgia's record-breaking in-person early voting turnout 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’s reporters and editors used Martyn, our AI assistant, to produce this story. Learn more about Martyn here. Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Jenna deJong and Edward T. Cummins
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