PENCE MAKES TAX CUTS FOCUS OF GEORGIA VISIT

VP touts tax cuts in Atlanta visit, says America ‘is coming back.’

Vice President Mike Pence trekked to Atlanta on Friday with a pair of missions: energizing a coalition of conservatives that powered him and President Donald Trump to office and raising loads of cash for the financially stretched Georgia GOP.

He tried to do both by turning to the $1.5 trillion package of federal tax cuts that Republicans adopted last year without a single Democratic vote, making clear that his party will increasingly rely on the initiative ahead of a tumultuous midterm vote.

“Georgia’s economy is booming as never before,” Pence told a crowd of hundreds gathered at the Loews Atlanta Hotel. “Growth is back. Confidence is back. In a word, America is back with President Donald Trump in the White House.”

It’s an early effort to rebut a wave of Democrats, including an unprecedented number of women, trying to channel outrage against Trump into electoral victory and chip into the GOP’s control of state politics. They are focusing on top-ticket races and down-ballot contests against incumbents who have rarely — if ever — faced a credi- ble challenger.

The races will put the traditional Republican coalition in Georgia to the test. The GOP ascended to power in the early 2000s by building an alliance of rural voters who were long loyal Democrats and more moderate suburbanites who valued the party’s fiscal policies.

B ut Trump’s rise in 2016 strained that alliance. Although the president carried the state by 5 points, he sputtered in the suburbs, where the traditional GOP strongholds of Cobb and Gwinnett counties flipped to the

HYOSUB SHIN / HSHIN@AJC.COM Vice President Mike Pence told the crowd gathered Friday at the Loews Atlanta Hotel that “Georgia’s economy is booming as never before. Growth is back. Confidence is back.”