Kimberly Jolasun, a 32-year-old businesswoman from Atlanta, never voted for the Republican presidential candidate. That may be about to change.

Her company, Villie, is an online platform that allows new parents to share photos and updates about their babies with friends and family and sign up for gifts like strollers and playpens. Her company is not yet profitable and needs financing to grow. But venture capitalists struggle with their untraditional profile, she said. Tech is dominated by white men in places like Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. She is a black woman in Georgia.

Banks want to charge you interest of up to 14 percent on business loans. The interest rate on the credit card debt he used to start the business has skyrocketed to 25 percent, tripling his monthly payments.

Jolasun knows that borrowing costs are driven by the Federal Reserve. She doesn’t blame President Biden. But she assumes her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, is more attuned to the needs of business owners. That’s why she’s seriously considering giving him his vote.

“For the first time in my life, the ball is in the air,” he said. “I haven’t made my decision.”

Despite signs of strength in the economy, higher borrowing costs are a source of financial anxiety that could prove crucial in the 2024 presidential election, especially in Georgia, one of six battleground states expected to determine the outcome. .

Black voters are a crucial bloc in Georgia; Four years ago, they made up 27 percent of the electorate. By many indications, African Americans are disproportionately affected by higher interest rates on mortgages, credit cards, student loans, and business debt. Startups owned by people of color, especially African Americans, face substantial barriers to raising funds, making them more vulnerable to rising borrowing costs, according to a Federal Reserve survey of minority-owned small businesses. Although their businesses tend to be smaller and less profitable, black and Hispanic entrepreneurs tend to be rejected in their funding applications even after accounting for differences in credit scores, suggesting that racial profiling is a problem.

“It’s hard for people like me to raise capital,” said Veronica Woodruff, founder of Travelsist, a company in Atlanta that pairs travelers who need help navigating airports with the support of their companions. “I am an Afro-Latina woman and I am in the south. It just makes it difficult to be in front of people writing checks.”

Woodruff, 40, has already raised $1.1 million, including a $250,000 grant from the Fearless Fund, a nonprofit that seeks to address the capital shortage for businesses owned by women of color. The organization has been crippled by a lawsuit from an advocacy group that says directing funds to minority women is racial discrimination.

Ms. Woodruff is seeking $8 million in additional investments to expand her business. Her rising costs have forced her to raise wages from $15 to $20 an hour. Venture capitalists demand more favorable conditions for their investments.

Raised in California, she considers herself a liberal who values ​​civil rights. But as a company supervisor, she has a hard time deciding how to vote.

“I’m taking a lot of risks here,” Woodruff said. “It’s for everyone, for all my employees, for everyone who has equity in this company and in the communities in which we operate.”

It is difficult to overstate the importance of the black vote in Georgia. From 2000 to 2019, the number of eligible voters in the state increased by 1.9 million, with Black people making up nearly half of that number, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

Biden captured 88 percent of the Black vote in Georgia in 2020 and is expected to win back that bloc by a huge margin in this year’s election. However, in a state decided by fewer than 12,000 votes four years ago, even a slight reduction in support could be decisive.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Atlanta on Monday at the start of an economic tour of battleground states to underscore the administration’s efforts to support Black business owners and entrepreneurs and narrow the racial wealth gap.

Trump was the candidate chosen by 16 percent of black voters nationally in a recent poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. The same survey found that 81 percent of black voters rated the economy as “fair” or “bad.”

Based on leading indicators, Georgia appears to be in a solid economic situation. In March, the unemployment rate was 3.1 percent, below the national level of 3.8 percent. Inflation has come down from its peaks. Atlanta has gained jobs by becoming a location for filming Hollywood movies and by attracting multinational companies that have set up corporate headquarters there.

Northwest of the city, Hyundai, the South Korean auto giant, is joining forces with another company, SK On, to invest $5 billion in building a battery plant for electric vehicles. A $2.3 billion solar panel factory is being built nearby by Hanwha Qcells, another South Korean company. And the state has seen an increase in food processing factories.

“We’ve gotten a lot of new projects, setting new records,” said Jeffrey M. Humphreys, an economist at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. “They all rely on each other.”

Off the coast of Savannah, what is already one of the largest container shipping ports in the country is expanding. Docks are receiving cargo diverted from the Port of Baltimore after a container ship crashed into a major bridge there, causing the bridge to collapse and halting cargo traffic.

But the effect of higher borrowing costs is not directly reflected in official inflation measures, and rising debt payments tend to erode the benefits of economic growth.

A recent paper by economists at Harvard and the International Monetary Fund concluded that higher payments on mortgages, credit cards and other forms of debt largely explained the gap between experts’ optimistic economic assessments and ordinary people’s gloomy forecasts. .

“Everyone feels stuck or struggling,” said John Lawson, who sells hip-hop-related shoelaces online and advises small businesses in the Atlanta area. “The cost of living has skyrocketed. “Everyone has a job and continues to work at the same time.”

Black Americans often suffer unemployment rates double those of white Americans. In Georgia, that gap has widened: Black unemployment hit 5.7 percent late last year, while white unemployment was 2.2 percent, according to an analysis of federal data by the Economic Policy Institute.

Part of this increase appears to reflect how Black-owned businesses have responded to higher borrowing costs: slowing hiring, reducing hours and cutting jobs, according to a report from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.

Many black entrepreneurs flock to Atlanta, a city where black Americans are prominently represented in the ranks of business, government and culture. But startups in Atlanta often struggle to secure adequate financing, local business owners said.

“Silicon Valley guys have so much capital that they would waste money on any absurd idea,” said Charles Wright, CEO of Mechanized AI, a startup that is building robots powered by artificial intelligence. Venture capitalists in the Southeast are more conservative, he added. “They don’t believe in fairy tales.”

Wright has plenty of funding for his next venture, given the sale of his data management startup for $22 million in 2018. He drives a red electric Porsche, one of four cars parked in front of his home in Stone Mountain, a Un leafy majority-black suburb next to a park that is an enduring monument to the Confederacy. He exudes certainty that mechanized AI is about to be worth billions.

“I’m sitting on what I know will be a unicorn,” he said. “There is no precedent for what we are doing.”

He is also confident that Black voters will dutifully, if not enthusiastically, vote for Biden, whom he credits with returning stability to the economy after the tumult of the Trump administration.

That can turn out like this. However, conversations with Black business owners in Atlanta revealed a pervasive sense of uncertainty.

Immediately after pandemic restrictions were lifted, Omar Whilby saw a significant increase in business at his nightclub in East Atlanta Village, a hotbed of bars and music venues.

“Everyone was tired of being at home,” Whilby said. People had money in their pockets, courtesy of pandemic relief programs established during Trump’s presidency.

But last year, with interest rates rising and gas, grocery and rent prices rising, Whilby’s club, iLounge Atlanta, saw its business drop by a third.

In response, it is slowing development of its technology business, Sound Capsul, which streams music shows online and allows independent artists to upload and share their music.

“We’ve had to scale back our growth strategy,” Whilby said.

Ray Woods, 34, an Atlanta-area real estate developer, sums up the electoral choice between a Republican Party that doesn’t care about black people and a Democratic Party that takes black voters for granted.

He voted twice for Barack Obama as president and admires Denmark, where high taxes fund a large and generous social safety net. He supported the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. He then voted for Trump in the general election.

Woods is ready to vote for Trump again this time, seeing it as the best way to promote business interests.

“America has been built on capitalism,” he said. “We need someone who understands business.”