State of the 2020: Georgia
This is part six in my series on the swing states for 2020. Believe it or not, the election is now less than a week away and it’s coming into the home stretch. Georgia is an interesting state as it’s likely to be very close on election night, so close it may not be decided that night. So I hope that translates into a good article here.
I have one state left to cover in this series after this, Florida. I plan to have that out before the polls close on Tuesday night. I will also be releasing a final prediction article where I will make calls for all fifty states (plus the District of Columbia). That may come out the same day as the Florida article or possibly earlier. The goal is simply to get all this done before Election Night. Without further ado, here’s Georgia.
Big Picture
Donald Trump- 2,089,104 (50.44 percent, down 2.86 percent from Romney in 2012)
Hillary Clinton- 1,877,963 (45.89 percent, up 0.38 percent from Obama in 2012)
Voter Turnout- 75.19 percent (up 3.39 percent from 2012)
In 2016, Georgia joined the rest of the South in backing Donald Trump in his successful presidential campaign. Unlike North Carolina, where Clinton was actually expected to be the slight favorite, FiveThirtyEight was confident giving Trump a 79 percent of victory in Georgia four years ago.
While it used to be more hospitable to Democrats, Georgia has been a Republican mainstay in recent decades; the last Democrat to win the state was Bill Clinton in 1992. During the 2000s, George Bush carried the state twice by double digits, making it a solidly Republican state. In 2008, however, Barack Obama came with five percentage points of meeting John McCain’s vote share. And while 2008 was seen as a strong Democratic wave year, the state has actually stayed within single digits in the elections since 2008.
Many people talk about Texas as a possible pickup for Democrats moving forward, but Georgia has been steadily receiving more attention in these discussions in the last four years. In 2017, a special election was held in Georgia’s 6th congressional district to replace Tom Price, who vacated the seat to serve as President Trump’s (first) Secretary of Health and Human Services. The 6th district, consisting mostly of suburbs north of Atlanta, had re-elected the Republican Price just months earlier with 61.7 percent of the vote; however, its standing as a Republican mainstay came under question as Democratic candidate Jon Osoff garnered national attention. The race was widely viewed as a referendum on President Trump and a preview of the 2018 midterms.
As a quick side note, Georgia uses a blanket primary system (also known as a “jungle” primary) for non-presidential elections. Unlike primaries in other states, Georgia places all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, on the same ballot. If one candidate gets 50 percent or more, that candidate wins. But if no candidate receives 50 percent, then a runoff election is held at a later date where only the top two candidates are on the ballot and the winner of the runoff wins the election.
In the 2017 blanket primary, Osoff took advantage of a fractured Republican field to win 48.1 percent of the vote, just 2 points away from winning the seat outright. Despite this, Republican Karen Handel emerged as the favorite in the runoff and she defeated Osoff with 51.8 percent versus 48.2 percent. While the battle was lost, Democrats were encouraged that Osoff was competitve among the district’s suburban voters, who appeared to be the clearest opportunity to siphon support away from Trump. Indeed, in 2018, Democrat Lucy McBath defeated Handel.
But the other race that made Democrats lick their lips was the 2018 governor’s election. Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, a black woman that served as minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, received national attention, record donations, and furthered the prospects of the state turning blue. In the end, Abrams came up short, only getting 48.8 percent of the vote. Even so, it was the closest governor’s election in Georgia since 1966 and highlighted inroads the Democratic Party has made in the state during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Unlike the other states I’ve covered in this series, where the current polling data indicates that Biden is a clear frontrunner, Georgia is far from being settled and the outcome will likely be decided by a few shifts in several places. Still, this will be a fun race to track on election night and here are the counties to look out for.
Solid Democratic Counties
Bibb (Macon city proper)
Calhoun (southwestern part of state)
Chatham (Savannah city proper and surrounding communities)
Clarke (Athens city proper, University of Georgia)
Clayton (Atlanta metropolitan area)
DeKalb (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Dougherty (Albany city proper and surrounding communities)
Fulton (Atlanta city proper and surrounding communities)
Hancock (central part of state)
Liberty (Savannah metropolitan area)
Macon (central part of state)
Muscogee (Columbus city proper)
Randolph (southwestern part of state)
Richmond (Augusta city proper)
Rockdale (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Stewart (southwestern part of state, on Alabama border)
Talbot (western part of state)
Taliaferro (eastern part of state)
Warren (eastern part of state)
First, there are nineteen solidly Democratic counties that Clinton carried with 55 percent of the vote or more. In 2016, she won this subsection with about 70 percent of the vote, a 2 percent improvement from President Obama’s 2012 performance. Granted, she slightly underperformed in fourteen of these counties, but she made up for these losses with improvements in the subsection’s larger counties. In Fulton County, for example, she performed almost 5 percentage points better than President Obama did four years prior. In terms of raw votes, Clinton netted 44,691 votes onto President Obama’s total. For a state that isn’t typically hospitable to Democrats, this is an impressive showing even among solid Democratic counties in other states. Looking at their history, it isn’t hard to see why Democrats perform so well in this subsection.
While they haven’t been entirely immune to Republican landslides (such as Nixon in 1972) or George Wallace’s 1968 run, these counties are generally steady mainstays in the Democratic column. All of them backed Obama in 2008, all but two have backed every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992, and eight have them have stayed blue since 1976. If we excuse Republican landslides, the Democratic consistency becomes even more apparent. Taliaferro County, for example, has only gone Republican once since 1912, back when Woodrow Wilson faced off against President William Howard Taft seeking a second term and former President Theodore Roosevelt seeking a “third” term (he technically didn’t serve two full terms, but came close to it). And Fulton County, home to Atlanta, has only gone Republican twice since 1876, spanning all the way back to the end of Reconstruction. Considering this history, it was very unlikely that Clinton wasn’t going to carry these counties, especially not with a Republican candidate like Donald Trump.
Demographically, this subsection is majority-nonwhite. In 2016, 58.5 percent of its population was nonwhite, most of them black, and 7.8 percent Hispanic. Overall, this exceeds the state average of 38.8 percent nonwhite and 9.4 percent Hispanic. While it does include Georgia’s largest and most urban county, Fulton County only accounts for 28 percent of the subsection’s nonwhite population. Clayton and DeKalb Counties, which mostly consist of suburbs outside Atlanta, also include substantial black populations. Outside the Atlanta metro, many blacks live in medium-sized cities, including Macon, Albany, Columbus, and Augusta. And finally, there are black pockets in the rural southwest corner of the state as well as the eastern half.
Regarding educational attainment, this subsection spans the entire spectrum of outcomes in Georgia. Three counties are in the top ten statewide, two (Fulton and DeKalb) in the Atlanta metropolitan area and the other (Clarke) being home to the Athens campus of the University of Georgia. With nearly 40,000 students enrolled, UGA Athens is a major economic driver in Clarke County and attracts workers with post-secondary and professional degrees. Outside the top ten, eleven of these counties fall within the top half statewide for adults with at least a bachelor’s degree; however, only four of them are actually above the state average of 30.7 percent. And then the other eight are in the bottom half of the state, with four of them having less than 10 percent of their adult populations having a four-year degree. These include Macon and Taliaferro, two rural, predominantly black counties that rank among the poorest in the state socioeconomically.
Speaking of which, this subsection performs alright socioeconomically. In 2016, its per capita income was higher than the state average ($50,218 versus $42,693 statewide); however, its unemployment (6.4 percent versus 5.4 percent) and poverty rates (18.5 percent versus 15.6 percent) were also above the state average. When broken down by county, however, this subsection ranges the entire spectrum of outcomes, but it does skew towards the bottom half. Some counties, such as Fulton, DeKalb, and Chatham perform exceptionally well, with Fulton having the highest per capita income in the entire state ($75,987). On the other hand, unemployment and poverty appear to be more of a problem in many of these counties. Four counties are in the bottom twenty in the state for per capita income, six counties are in the top twenty for highest poverty rate (with Stewart topping the entire list with 39.2 percent), and three counties being in the top ten statewide for highest unemployment rate. In general, this variance across all three indicators reflects a high level of inequality within this subsection, both across the subsection and within the individual counties.
On the whole, these counties present a strong mixture of demographics, geographical placement, and economics that support their long history of Democratic support. According to exit polls, Clinton won 83 percent of non-white voters in Georgia, including 89 percent of black voters (outpacing her national margins). While smaller than her national margins, she also narrowly won among Georgia national graduates, especially among non-white college graduates. She won by 13 points among voters making less than $30,000 per year (close to her national margin). And while she lost among all suburban voters statewide by 5 points (not much worse than her national performance), she did extremely well among voters living in Atlanta’s suburbs, giving her a clear base of support to build off of.
Indeed, Stacey Abrams built upon Clinton’s performance two years later, winning 73.2 percent of the vote in this subsection. Despite being a midterm election, which normally experiences lower voter turnout than presidential races, Abrams also received 18,680 more votes in this subsection than Clinton did, an impressive feat in its own right. Looking at the individual counties, Abrams improved upon Clinton’s vote share in twelve counties, most critically in Chatham, DeKalb, and Fulton, the main population centers of the subsection.
As for the exit polls, Abrams did perform better with college graduates, winning them by 13 points. She also won voters that made less than $50,000 per year. One other figure I found interesting (that wasn’t included on the 2016 exit polls) is that Abrams won among voters that weren’t originally born in Georgia by 7 points. And within that group, she won by 30 points among voters that moved to Georgia within the last ten years. This figure most clearly demonstrates that the persistent influx of new residents into the state is shifting its political composition away from the Republican Party, something that future Democratic candidates can use to become more competitive here.
But on the other hand, there’s still room for improvement. Despite her immense credit for making the governor’s race competitive, Abrams barely made a dent into the Republicans’ hefty advantage among white voters in both 2016 and 2018. Despite performing better in the suburban counties included in this subsection, overall she did worse among suburban voters statewide than Clinton did, losing them by 13 percentage points. And overall, she actually carried less of the Clinton vote than Kemp carried the Trump vote. While exit polls aren’t without error, these results show that Abrams’s performance, while impressive, wasn’t without its faults.
Overall, this is a solid backbone for Joe Biden to go off of in 2020. While each of these counties have displayed a long history of Democratic support, it’s very likely that given their demographic breakdown, he will continue to carry these counties by strong margins.
Swing Counties
Baker (southwestern part of state)
Baldwin (central part of state)
Burke (Augusta metropolitan area)
Clay (southwestern part of state, on Alabama border)
Cobb (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Dooly (central part of state)
Douglas (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Early (southwestern part of state, on Alabama border)
Gwinnett (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Henry (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Jefferson (eastern part of state)
Newton (Atlanta metropolitan area)
Peach (central part of state)
Sumter (southwestern part of state, Plains)
Terrell (southwestern part of state)
Twiggs (Macon metropolitan area)
Washington (eastern part of state)
Next, seventeen counties are classified as swing, where Clinton received between 45 and 55 percent of the vote. Generally speaking, these counties were decided by less than 10 percentage points, although third party candidates can complicate this margin. In 2012, President Obama won fourteen of these counties 46.1 percent of the vote. Four years later, Clinton only won twelve of these counties, but she improved her overall performance in the subsection with 50.3 percent of the vote. This disconnect occurred because while she underperformed President Obama’s vote share in thirteen of the seventeen counties, the four counties where she did improve upon his performance happened to be the four largest counties in the subsection, including Cobb, Douglas, Gwinnett, and Henry. As a result, she received 63,654 more votes than President Obama in this subsection.
In the spirit of their swing classification, eleven of these counties were also considered swing in 2012. Eight of these counties flipped in 2016 from how they voted in 2012 (which will be discussed more in the next section). Of the remaining nine, six of them have remained in the Democratic column since Obama won them in 2008, two of them have stayed blue since 1992, and one (Clay) has supported every Democratic candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. For the most part, though, these counties don’t have an extensive history of favoring one party in presidential elections, embodying the swing county classification.
Demographically, this subsection is very racially and ethnically diverse. In 2016, 43.2 percent of its population was nonwhite and 14 percent was Hispanic (both above the state average). Nine of these counties are majority-nonwhite, some of which are in the Atlanta metropolitan area, some of which inhabit the medium-sized cities in this subsection, and some of which are in the more rural pockets.
While some of these counties have stagnated in their population, a lot of them have really taken off in the last twenty years, especially those in the Atlanta suburbs. Gwinnett, for example, is a suburban county that has nearly doubled its population since 2000 and has become substantially more diverse, going from 22.7 percent nonwhite in 2000 to 43.6 percent nonwhite by 2016. Other suburbs, including those in Cobb and Douglas Counties have experienced similar growth and diversification, allowing Democrats to build serious inroads among its voters.
Regarding educational attainment, these counties also span the entire range for Georgia. Two of these counties are in the top ten statewide and nine are in the top half. For the most part, this includes counties in the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has an attractive job market for college graduates. But it also includes those in more rural parts of the state. Ranked at 59th is Sumter County, which includes Plains, former President Jimmy Carter’s hometown. On the other hand, the other eight counties are in the bottom half of the state. In all eight of these counties, less than 15 percent of their adult residents have at least a bachelor’s degree and one of them, Clay County, has the second lowest figure in the entire state. These counties in the bottom half are primarily rural spread out across the southern, central, and eastern portions of the state.
Socioeconomically, this subsection performs alright, although it’s not as affluent as the solidly Democratic counties. Its unemployment rate is slightly below the state average at 5 percent; however, this subsection’s per capita income of $41,388 is also slightly below the state average and certainly below that of the solidly Democratic counties. On the subsection level, there doesn’t seem to be too many problems economically. When broken down by individual counties, however, there appears to be a high level of inequality. On one hand ten counties are in the top half of the state for per capita income, with many of these counties being in the Atlanta metropolitan area. And along with that, the unemployment and poverty rates in these counties are fairly manageable. But on the other hand, twelve counties have an unemployment rate of 6 percent or higher and ten counties have a poverty rate above 25 percent. Similar to the trend seen for educational attainment, many of these counties on the higher end of these spectrums are the rural counties with fewer college graduates. And while the per capita income is a bit higher for some of this, these counties are not as prosperous as the suburban swing counties. On the whole, this reflects a high level of socioeconomic inequality within this subsection.
In 2018, Stacy Abrams only won ten of these counties, down from the twelve Clinton won just two years earlier. Two of them (Baker and Early) even moved out of the swing category and into the solidly Republican column. And in ten counties, Abrams received a smaller vote share than Clinton. But across the entire subsection, Abrams actually improved upon Clinton’s vote share (and total), winning it with 55.3 percent (an additional 28,232 votes). While voter turnout was 14 percent lower than it was in 2016, it was still very high for a midterm election, reaching 62.3 percent.
Similar to the solidly Democratic counties, Abrams saw her biggest improvement in the larger counties in this subsection, particularly Cobb, Douglas, Gwinnett, Henry, and Newton Counties. All five of these are in the Atlanta metropolitan area, which further establishes that region as favorable Democratic territory. While it’d be ideal if Abrams had performed better in the more rural pockets and medium-sized cities, the losses described above aren’t as drastic as they appear (her biggest loss, Baker County, was only 3 percentage points). And while two counties did move out of the swing category by voting too far to the right, another three counties (Douglas, Gwinnett, and Henry) moved out of the swing category by voting too far to the left, that is Abrams got more than 55 percent of the vote. So in general, while there are some signs that this subsection is diverging along urban/rural lines, Democrats still fare reasonably well here.
Overall, these counties encapsulate the inroads that Democrats have made in recent years, especially following 2016. This subsection has a healthy mixture of suburban voters, who have been behind Democratic gains in the 2018 midterm elections. If Biden can continue to win over the suburban voters, he can go a long way to winning statewide.
Flipped Counties
Baker (Obama-Trump, southwestern part of state)
Cobb (Romney-Clinton, Atlanta metropolitan area)
Dooly (Obama-Trump, central part of state)
Early (Obama-Trump, southwestern part of state, on Alabama border)
Gwinnett (Romney-Clinton, Atlanta metropolitan area)
Henry (Romney-Clinton, Atlanta metropolitan area)
Peach (Obama-Trump, central part of state)
Quitman (Obama-Trump, southwestern part of state, on Alabama border)
Twiggs (Obama-Trump, Macon metropolitan area)
Finally, there are nine counties that flipped between 2012 and 2016; six of them flipped from President Obama to Donald Trump and three of them flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton. And all but one of them overlap in the swing subsection, demonstrating that these counties are highly competitive. Fittingly, in 2016, Clinton won just under 50 percent of the vote in these nine counties with 76.5 percent turnout. This is a 5-point improvement from Obama’s 2012 performance (where he only got 44.7 percent of the vote with 74.6 percent turnout).
When broken down by sub-category, however, Clinton underperformed in the Obama-Trump counties, only getting 47.2 percent of the vote, compared with President Obama’s 53 percent. This loss only translates to 2,652 fewer votes, but considering that these are mostly rural counties, that deficit ate more into her vote share. Conversely, Clinton saw a 5-point bounce in the Romney-Clinton counties, going from President Obama’s 44.3 percent to her 50.1 percent. And considering that all three of these counties are fairly large suburban counties, this bounce translates to almost 70,000 more votes. So while Clinton losing seven Obama counties may sound bad, the three counties she netted more than made up for it.
The six Obama-Trump counties are rural pockets spread out across the southwestern and central parts of the state. For the most part, they have a long history of supporting Democrats in presidential elections. Before 2016, four of them had gone blue in every election since 1976 and, before the 2000s, would have been considered solidly Democratic counties. In recent years, these four became more competitive, but remained in the Democratic column up until 2016. Another one, Peach County, had gone Democratic in all but one election (2004) since 1976, before flipping over in 2016. Peach County was more consistently competitive than the other four, but it managed to stay in the Democratic column for most years. And Early County has gone back and forth for decades and displayed some interesting voting patterns. It went for Georgia’s favorite son Jimmy Carter in 1980 over Republican Ronald Reagan with 57.3 percent before swinging almost 20 points four years later to back President Ronald Reagan with 60 percent. Early County also narrowly went for John McCain in 2008 before swinging to President Obama in 2012, before swinging back to Donald Trump in 2016. When looking at all six counties, there was a clear and decisive swing from Obama to Trump, where they each swung by an average of 6 percentage points.
Meanwhile, the three Romney-Clinton counties are all suburbs in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Similar to other suburbs throughout the country, these three counties have a long history of supporting Republicans; all of them have backed every Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. As recently as 2004, George Bush was able to win these counties with over 60 percent of the vote. Obama was able to narrow that margin in both his presidential bids, but even Cobb County still backed Romney with 55.3 percent in 2012. 2016 marked a turning point where Clinton won all three, partly due to making inroads with these voters but also due to third-party candidates like Gary Johnson siphoning votes away from Donald Trump. Third-party candidates collectively tripled their vote share in these counties from 2012 to 2016, even getting up to 6.3 percent of the vote in Cobb County. This allowed Clinton to carry these counties with about 50 percent of the vote but also have a margin of 3 to 6 percentage points.
Demographically, these nine flipped counties are highly diverse. Both the Obama-Trump and Romney-Clinton counties are more nonwhite than the state average, with 48.8 percent and 41.4 percent respectively. Regarding Hispanic population, however, the Obama-Trump counties are below the state average at only 5.5 percent, but the Romney-Clinton counties are notably above the state average at 16 percent. In both cases, there’s a clear constituency within these sub-categories that Democrats can have success appealing to, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter protests and race issues that have controlled the national conversation in recent months. In the case of Romney-Clinton counties, the large Hispanic population can be advantageous to Democrats due to President Trump’s tough stance against immigration.
Regarding educational attainment, there is a sharp divide between the Romney-Clinton and Obama-Trump counties. All three of the Romney-Clinton counties are in the top twenty statewide for adults with at least a bachelor’s degree, indicative of their proximity to Atlanta and its abundance of universities and high-paying jobs. On the other hand, Peach County, the highest ranked Obama-Trump county, is only at 57th place with 19.4 percent of its population holding a bachelor’s degree for higher. And going down the list, four of these counties have less than 15 percent of its population holding a four-year degree and two of them cracking the bottom ten in the state. Similar to the trend seen in Georgia’s other subsections, this divide reflects the vastly different educational outcomes and opportunities between the state’s urban centers and its rural expanse.
And the socioeconomic situation in this subsection paints a similar picture. Collectively, the Romney-Clinton counties had a per capita income of $43,528 and an unemployment rate of 4.8 percent in 2016 (both better than the state average). Conversely, the Obama-Trump counties collectively had a per capita income of $33,603 and an unemployment rate of 7 percent (both worse than the state average). Broken down by individual county, the three suburban Romney-Clinton counties are in the upper/lower echelon statewide across per capita income, unemployment, and poverty respectively while the six Obama-Trump counties are mostly on the opposite ends of those spectrums. All three of them have a per capita income above $35,000, all three of them of them have a poverty rate below 15 percent, and Henry County’s unemployment rate in 2016 (the highest of the three) was still below that of all six Obama-Trump counties. Conversely, while four of the six Obama-Trump counties fall within the top third in the state for per capita income, unemployment and poverty are more substantial problems. Five of these counties have an unemployment rate about 6 percent and all of them have a poverty rate above 20 percent. Putting these metrics together, this suggests that the Obama-Trump counties have a high level of economic inequality and don’t perform well generally speaking.
And in the 2018 midterms, there’s another divide between the two sub-categories. In the Obama-Trump counties, Abrams performed about 0.8 points worse than Clinton did in 2016, only getting 46.3 percent of the vote. Broken down by county, she received a smaller vote share in every county; however, these losses were no more than a couple percentage points. Conversely, Abrams picked up ground in the Romney-Clinton counties, receiving 55.6 percent of the vote. In all three counties, she added at least 5 percentage points to Clinton’s vote share. And considering that the Romney-Clinton counties constitute a much larger electorate than the Obama-Trump counties, this resulted in a net gain for Abrams in these flipped counties.
Overall, there’s a stark divide between the Obama-Trump counties and the Romney-Clinton counties in terms of demographics, socioeconomic indicators, geography, and voting behavior. As such, these two groups of counties are diverging from each other in their political leanings. While it’s unlikely that Biden can recapture the Obama-Trump counties, the gains the Democrats have made in the Romney-Clinton counties more than makes up for the losses. And considering that the Romney-Clinton counties are adjacent to many of the state’s solidly Democratic and swing counties, it’s a worthwhile investment to concentrate campaign resources in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
Conclusion
Overall, there have been clear opportunities that have emerged in recent years in the Peach State. The most obvious is the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has representation in all three subsections discussed in this article. Democrats have capitalized on these opportunities by gaining support among suburban voters that feel uncomfortable with President Trump’s policies and rhetoric. Democrats have also benefited from new voters moving into the state, many of whom settle down in the Atlanta metropolitan area to take advantage of the city’s high-paying jobs. Obviously, the increases in 2016 and 2018 weren’t enough to land Democrats a statewide win, so Biden will need to continue to rope in more of these voters.
None of this is to say that Biden should rely solely on these suburbs. There are still pockets of support in the rural parts of the state, particularly those that are predominantly black. And Biden can also turn to medium-sized cities, such as Macon, Savannah, and Athens. But this analysis demonstrates that the clearest road to victory for Joe Biden runs through the Atlanta suburbs.
As I mentioned at the end of my North Carolina article, however, one shouldn’t underestimate the Republican strength in this state and how many voters will be willing to settle for Trump as a “lesser of two evils”. This statement holds even more so for Georgia, as unlike North Carolina, it did not go for Obama in either of his two elections. And before 2020, many didn’t think Georgia would be in reach for Democrats in this election; they thought that, like Texas, it wouldn’t be “ready” until 2024 or even later. But in an election where President Trump has been underwater in national polling and the political headwinds are strongly in favor of Joe Biden, Georgia is now in a position where a few additional voters here and there can turn the tide.
So that’s all I have about Georgia. In the final part of this swing state series, I plan to cover Florida and how it might vote next week.
