WASHINGTON – David Perdue announced last week that he would not recapture his Senate seat in Georgia for the Republicans. Many in the political class have asked themselves why a strong candidate with deep family ties and a history as incumbent would get a chance to run again.
The answer may lie in broader political changes in Georgia itself.
While Joe Biden’s presidential victory in the state and the Senate victories of Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff have been announced as surprises in the recent election cycle, recent election data in the state show that these could be breakthroughs to a new norm, rather than simple 2020 shockers.
Let’s start by looking at the overall shift in the state presidential vote over the past 12 years.
In 2008, Barrack Obama took 52.8 percent of the national vote. This past November, President Joe Biden obtained a smaller percentage of the national referendum, 51.2 percent, about 1.6 points less.
But compare the two elections in Georgia and the story is different. Biden fared about 2.5 points better than Obama in the state and received nearly 50 percent of the vote, while in 2008 Obama did not quite reach 47 percent.
At the time, the Obama number appeared to be an outlier – perhaps a high-water mark for a Democrat driven by an increase in the African-American vote. But even in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, she got more than 45 percent of the vote in the state. That was higher than the 43 percent and 41 percent that Democratic nominees Al Gore and John Kerry won in the state in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
The reality is that the vote in Georgia has moved significantly over the past twelve years, and behind the move, a massive fluctuation is shifting to the Democrats around Atlanta. In fact, compared to 2008 to 2020, seven of the ten provinces that swung the heaviest toward Democrats across the country were in metro Atlanta.
In each of the counties – Cobb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale – Biden did at least 11 points better in 2020 than Obama did in 2008.
To be clear, Biden did not win all the provinces in 2020. He won five of them by large sums, but Forsyth and Fayette still voted solidly for Donald Trump in November. The problem for Trump, and possibly for the Republicans going forward, was margins. Some of the provinces have Democratic ‘knee-jerk’, but just as importantly, where Trump lost, he lost by more than McCain in 2008. Where he won, he won by less.
The seven provinces in Atlanta pose challenges to the IDP. They are very diverse, most have a high percentage of college graduates and, perhaps most importantly, all grow rapidly.
Not only have all these seven provinces been growing faster than the country as a whole since 2010, but five of them are growing faster than Georgia at that time, and the state is adding people very quickly. In other words, the provinces that are fueling the state’s political changes are also driving a large part of the population growth.
Add it all up, and Georgia currently presents a troubling picture for the IDP. Political winds can change quickly, of course, but there are reasons to believe that the story of the state has legs beyond this year and beyond its borders.
It seems that the path that the Republican Party has followed over the past few years, partly pushed by Donald Trump, has increased the chances of Republicans in places in the Industrial Middle East, such as Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. But in states with growing suburban populations, the story can be reversed.
At the moment, Georgia 12 years ago looks like Virginia, a southern state being transformed by a large, diversifying, trained metropolitan center. When Obama won Virginia in 2008, it was the sign of a deeper, long-term change there. A similar road in Georgia will have a major impact on the ballot and the Senate.