Jimmy Carter is less than two months away from his 100th birthday on October 1, but family members say he is focused on achieving a different goal: voting for Kamala Harris for president.

Jimmy has been in hospice care for a year and a half, and while his condition hasn’t altered significantly since February 2023, his grandson Jason Carter told Southern Living in June that the 99-year-old grandfather was “no longer awake every day.”

Two months later, Jason provides a more upbeat health update for the 39th President of the United States.

While advertising an upcoming tribute performance for his grandfather’s birthday, Jason told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Jimmy had been “more alert and interested in politics and the war in Gaza” in recent days.

Jason previously stated that his grandfather has good and bad days, and that it is frequently difficult to predict his mood when family members stop by for visits.

When Jimmy’s son Chip Carter asked him last week if he wanted to live to reach his 100th birthday, the former president replied, “I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” according to Jason.

Though the 2024 presidential election is three months away, the former president would not have to wait until November 5 to vote. Georgia starts early voting on October 15 and mails absentee votes up to 29 days before the election.

If a person passes away between the early voting period and Election Day, Georgia does not impose any restrictions on ballot counting.

Jimmy, a Democrat who served in the White House from 1977 to 1981, has received bipartisan appreciation for his post-presidential humanitarian efforts. For a while, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was quieter in politics than other past presidents, but he became more active during Donald Trump’s presidency.

“I think it’s well-known that the incumbent [President Trump] is very careless with the truth,” Jimmy told CBS News in an interview from 2018. He continued: “I think I went through my campaign and my presidency without ever lying to the people or making a deliberately false statement, and I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to reinsert into politics these days.”

“I believe he is a disaster” in human rights and treating people equally,” the former president stated in a second Washington Post interview around the same time, before his wife, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, intervened. “The worst is that he is not telling the truth, and that just hurts everything,” she told me.

Jimmy expressed confidence in the Biden-Harris administration after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.

“Rosalynn joins me in congratulating our friends President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,” the candidate stated in a press release. “We are proud of their well-run campaign and look forward to seeing the positive change they bring to our nation.”

Georgia will play an important role in the 2024 presidential election between Harris and Trump, as it is a swing state with 16 electoral votes. In 2020, Biden and Harris won Georgia by only 11,779 votes, or 0.23%.

Jimmy, as its previous governor, is heavily entrenched in the state’s politics. He dedicated his political career to achieving equality for all Americans at a time when segregationist and sexist ideas dominated his rural Georgia neighborhood.

“The time for racial discrimination is over,” he declared in his 1971 gubernatorial inaugural speech, emphasizing that Black people should never “have to bear the additional burden” of being denied equal opportunity. He has also consistently advocated for gender equality, supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and leaving the Southern Baptist Church in 2000 after it announced that women could not serve as pastors.

Jimmy became president when he nominated the first Black woman to the United States Cabinet, and he has since witnessed the election of the first Black woman to the Senate, the first Black female Supreme Court justice, and the first Black female vice president.

His unexpected longevity in hospice care enabled him to see the first Black woman nominated for president by a major party on Friday, August 2.