Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance was in Georgia on Saturday morning. He rallied supporters and called out Vice President Kamala Harris for what he says is the suggestion that voters are bad people for supporting conservative policies.
‘Here’s my message to Kamala Harris,’ Vance told the crowd in Atlanta. ‘Stop censoring your fellow citizens, try to persuade them and you might actually get somewhere. Stop telling people they’re racist because they want their children to go to schools with kids who speak the English language.’
Vance continued, ‘Stop telling American citizens they’re bad people because they don’t want fentanyl flooding their communities. Stop telling the American people they don’t deserve to have smaller hospital wait times. Stop telling the American people they’re bad for wanting a secure southern border.’
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Vance’s appearance in Georgia came as early voting numbers have hit record totals in the key battleground state where election officials say the vote count has already exceeded more than half of 2020’s total turnout.
‘So over 50% of the turnout for 2020 has already voted in Georgia,’ tweeted Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office. ‘So for people like Joe Biden & Stacey Abrams, you were wrong saying we had voter suppression here. It’s easy to register & vote in Georgia…and really hard to even try to cheat. Great job by our voters & counties.’
More than 2.6 million people in the Peach State have voted early, according to Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office. The total vote count in the 2020 election was barely under five million, with former President Trump narrowly losing to President Biden by a margin of just 11,779 votes.
Vance told a reporter after his remarks on Saturday that he believes Republicans in Georgia have embraced early voting as opposed to past years, in part due to the election reforms the state has put in place.
Gov. Brian Kemp signed an overhaul of Georgia’s election rules into law in 2021, after Trump made unproven claims of widespread voter fraud that he said cost him the state’s 16 electoral votes in the last presidential election. Republicans said that new restrictions on absentee and mail-in voting, expanded voter ID requirements and prohibitions on non-poll workers from providing food and drink to voters waiting in line at poll centers were necessary to preserve election integrity.
Fox News Digital’s Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report