Vice President Kamala Harris, standing in the state with the most restrictive abortion law of any campaign battleground, excoriated former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday for his role in the unraveling of a nationally recognized right to abortion.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Atlanta, Ms. Harris wagered once again that highlighting Mr. Trump’s record on abortion — including his appointment of three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 — could persuade voters in a closely divided place. The Georgia Supreme Court this month reinstated a law that largely bans abortions beyond roughly six weeks of pregnancy.
“Donald Trump still refuses to take accountability — to take any accountability — for the pain and the suffering he has caused, or even to just acknowledge the pain and suffering that has actually happened,” Ms. Harris said at the rally, moments after a video played about a woman who died in 2022 after her medical care in Georgia was delayed.
Ms. Harris has made abortion access a centerpiece of her campaign. As the video played, she stood at the lectern, watching and sometimes shaking her head, her arms crossed, as relatives of the woman, Amber Thurman, sat in the audience. ProPublica reported in September that a state committee, whose reviews of individual cases are not generally made public, had concluded that Ms. Thurman’s death had been “preventable.”
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said in a text message: “President Trump has always supported exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, which Georgia’s law provides. With those exceptions in place, it’s unclear why doctors did not swiftly act to protect Amber Thurman’s life.”
Before turning to Ms. Thurman’s story, Ms. Harris had spent much of her address pressing her supporters to take nothing for granted in the campaign’s final weeks.
“We have 17 days left — 17 days left in one of the most consequential elections of our lifetime,” she told an exuberant audience that crawled up the lawn at Lakewood Amphitheater. “And, look, let’s have some real talk: It’s going to be a tight race until the very end.”
As she has before, Ms. Harris declared herself the underdog — and then she went on to predict victory.
Atlanta had already hosted one of the vice president’s largest rallies. Her visit on Saturday attracted one of the city’s biggest stars: the R&B singer Usher, who used the rally stage to urge people to help the campaign make its case through door-knocks, phone calls and simple conversations.
“Everything that we do within the next 17 days will affect the lives of our children, of our grandchildren, of the people whom we love the most,” Usher said. Responding to the raucous crowd, he added, “I love you more, but I love Kamala Harris even more.”
Especially after Mr. Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 13,000 votes in 2020, the state figured to be one of this year’s most competitive. Polling has long shown a tight race in Georgia, often within any given survey’s margin of error.
But with Election Day approaching, what was for four years a low rumble has now exploded into a fervor. Since Tuesday, when early voting began, more than a million people have streamed to the polls. State officials have reported a series of turnout records, and if absentee ballots are included, more than 1.3 million people have already voted. In 2020, just shy of five million Georgians voted in the presidential race.
One of this year’s voters is former President Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on Oct. 1 and has been in hospice care since February 2023. Mr. Carter returned his absentee ballot on Wednesday, when a relative placed it in a drop box in Americus, Ga., not far from the former president’s home in Plains.
“If Jimmy Carter can vote early,” Ms. Harris said on Saturday night, “you can, too!”
She is scheduled to visit New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, just east of Atlanta, on Sunday morning, and she is expected to return to Georgia on Thursday for a rally with former President Barack Obama.
Mr. Trump is planning to visit Georgia on Wednesday, appearing at a town-hall meeting in Zebulon and then a rally in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth.
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