Swing state guides: Georgia

A rich history made this swing state crucial but tricky for Harris

Between now and election day, I’m going to be publishing swing state guides roughly once a week. The posts are designed to be digestible guides to understanding the political geography and demographics of each swing state, and I guarantee that they’ll make you the most informed person at your watch party on election night.

Most swing state guides are and will only be available to paid subscribers. But between now and election day, there’s a 15% discount to all annual subscriptions - so sign up now to lock in a low price and be able to access all of the guides between now and the election. You can also check out the guide to Arizona, guide to North Carolina (free to read), guide to Nebraska’s 2nd district (free to read), guide to Nevada, guide to Michigan, and guide to Wisconsin. The guide to all-important Pennsylvania is coming up next Tuesday.

Georgia was the big surprise of the 2020 election, delivering its Electoral College votes and then two Senate seats to Democrats. Biden didn’t need to win Georgia to win the election, but the fact he did got Democrats excited about their future prospects in the South.

Biden’s victory was a surprise both because of Georgia’s own electoral history and also because the South as a whole had felt out of reach for Democrats since the 1990s. At the risk of generalizing a little, the basic demographic make-up of most Southern states is that they have a large white majority and an African-American population making up about 20-35% of the total. At the same time, they have comparatively fewer Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans than many other states, a product of less historical in-migration from overseas than in the North East or West. On top of this, Southern states are just much more conservative - for example, about 50% of adults in Louisiana describe themselves as “conservative” and just 14% liberal, as opposed to 35% conservative and 24% liberal in Michigan.

As American politics has become more racially and ideologically polarized, the South has become a weak region for the Democratic Party. The party doesn’t get as completely as annihilated as it does in, say, West Virginia (which is over 90% white) because there’s still a reservoir of African-Americans and urban liberals to deliver votes. But in most of the region, breaking ahead of about 40% of the vote looks very hard to do.

Then you have Georgia. Or, to put a finer point on it, you have Atlanta.

Atlanta is the capital of Georgia and some would say the entire South. Over six million people live in the Atlanta metropolitan area, dwarfing any other city in the region (not counting Texas) and containing over half the population of the state. It’s also incredibly diverse, and only becoming more so over time as immigrants flow into its booming economy. Sometimes called “the black Mecca”, the city was a key center of the civil rights movement and of economic and political empowerment for African-Americans in the decades since (which is not to say that the “mecca” image is completely deserved). But the city is also notable for its incredibly diverse suburbs, which contain - for the South - an unusually high number of Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans.

If you could put an Atlanta in every Southern state, they’d all be swing states. But it’s in Georgia, so it’s Georgia that finally flipped in 2020 and which is now giving Kamala Harris hope. But to really understand why this has happened, you have to break the state down into regions.

Political geography of Georgia

If you take a look at a map of Georgia showing the 2020 election results by county, then you’ll see some features that are familiar from other states we’ve looked at in this series, like North Carolina and Wisconsin. Most notably, you see areas of blue in a sea of red. The area circled in green near the top is the core of metro Atlanta, and the surrounding areas of blue are its exurbs. The region covered by the purple arrow is the “black belt”, so-called because of its fertile soil - but which also came to be heavily populated by African-Americans as a consequence of plantation slavery. Some of these counties are heavily rural, but the region is anchored at two ends by the cities of Augusta and Columbus. Then, in the southeast, you have a heavy dollop of blue thanks to the city of Savannah. Much of the rest of what you’re looking at are rural and small town areas that are red.

For the sake of imposing an easily-understandable schema, it’s worth thinking about the political geography of Georgia as consisting of five regions:

Core of metro Atlanta. The three core counties of Atlanta - Fulton, DeKalb and Clayton (circled in green) - have always seen good hunting for Democrats. They’re heavily non-white, although as African-Americans have moved out to the burbs and Asian-Americans and Hispanics have moved in, the core of downtown Atlanta is now no longer majority African-American for the first time in decades. These counties are also growing fast, sucking in migrants attracted to the region’s booming economy and cultural scene - and those migrants are making the city even bluer.