Heading into Thursday's presidential debate in Atlanta, President Joe Biden might be the incumbent, but former President Donald Trump is carrying momentum.
A poll released Tuesday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found the 45th president holding a 5-point lead over his successor in the Peach State.
That's no small feat, considering a Georgia prosecutor is trying to put Trump in jail.
Besides being the state capital, Atlanta is the county seat of Fulton County, the domain of District Attorney Fani Willis and one of the major fronts in Democrats' ongoing lawfare campaign against Trump.
As the backdrop of Willis' national headline-generating efforts to prosecute Trump and other defendants on supposedly corrupt efforts to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, the battleground state of Georgia might be expected to be hostile territory for Trump.
But the AJC found that Trump leads Biden 43 percent to 38 percent among likely voters -- outside the poll's margin of error of 3.1 percent.
Independent contender Robert F. Kenney Jr. -- who is not being allowed to participate in Thursday's faceoff -- had 9 percent, the AJC reported.
And all of that is great news for Trump and his supporters.
Not only does it signal momentum for Trump in a state he lost in 2020 by only 11,000 votes, it's a sign that the efforts by politically motivated prosecutors such as Willis, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and special counsel Jack Smith at the federal level are having a muted effect among voters.
Few candidates are popular enough to have a grand jury indictment hanging over their heads and still remain credible, but that's exactly what Trump is doing in Georgia, according to the poll.
That's momentum Trump can carry into the Atlanta studios of CNN, the network hosting the debate. (Considering the antagonistic relationship between Trump, the network as a whole and its two debate moderators in particular -- Jake Tapper and Dana Bash \-- it's momentum he might need.)
The poll could well be an important sign for the presidential campaign outside of Georgia state lines.
Democrats had no doubt hoped the relentless drumbeat of legal prosecution would tarnish Trump in the eyes of voters. But the efforts are so transparently political that they could well be backfiring. Even Trump's most emphatic supporters would have trouble describing the larger-than-life billionaire businessman with a bellicose air as a sympathetic figure.
Admirable? Charismatic? Decisive? Yes.
Sympathetic? Not so much.
But that's exactly how the hounding of Democratic prosecutors, warping the rule of law in their yelping pursuit of power, have made Trump appear.
It also isn't helping Democrats that Willis' case has been put on hold, pending an appeals court review of a prosecution tainted by tawdry tales of an illicit lover affair that bilked Fulton County taxpayers at the same time as it targeted Trump. (It's a good bet that's a turnoff to Georgia voters.)
In Smith's ongoing cases against Trump, he's facing a no-nonsense federal judge, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida who, as National Review's Andrew McCarthy noted Monday, could be on the verge of ruling Smith's appointment as unconstitutional.
One poll does not an election make, of course. But Trump has been doing well enough, in enough of them, that it's pointing to the fact that prosecutors pimping the rule of law for political power are not impressing Americans.
But it's one more reason for voters to be watching the Atlanta debate.
