Georgia has been on Donald Trump’s mind since his achingly close margin of defeat there in 2020. This time around, polls suggest he won’t need a post-election phone call to state election officials to find him the votes — he’s gaining the votes he needs to win all on his own.
The former president had maintained a continuous lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average over the incumbent president here since last year. Joe Biden hadn’t led in a single poll since November. Had he stayed in the race, its outcome was nearly a foregone conclusion.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ entry into the contest has only served to narrow Trump’s polling lead. Trump is ahead by 2.5 points in the two polls taken since her surprising emergence. His lead drops to 1.5 points when all third-party candidates are removed from the poll question, showing he can win a one-on-one contest. That’s not a landslide, but it’s enough to flip Georgia’s crucial 16 Electoral College votes into his column.
Democrats have only the narrowest of paths to victory in the Peach State despite Biden’s performance there and their three consecutive US Senate wins. None of those candidates got a majority in the November election; all won their seats in two-candidate runoffs that aren’t required in the presidential race. Even strong Democratic campaigns seem to top out at Biden’s 2020 49.5%.
This is largely because of the state’s large rural white population. Georgia’s rural whites give any Republican huge leads, and even metro Atlanta’s spectacular growth hasn’t eclipsed their influence. Trump won 75% or more in 38 of the state’s 156 counties and ran up the score in many more.
Democrats do run well in the state’s regional cities, such as Savannah, Augusta and Athens, home to the University of Georgia. They also carry rural counties where blacks are a majority of voters or close to it.
But even those pockets of strength don’t outweigh the rural white vote. All counties outside the Atlanta metro area cast 52% of the vote in 2020, and Trump easily carried it with roughly 62%.
That makes Atlanta and its suburbs the state’s key battleground. To win, Democrats must take about 90% of the black vote, which is centered in Atlanta’s Fulton County and areas in Cobb, Gwinnett, Clayton and DeKalb counties. But even that isn’t enough, as losing gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams showed in 2022.
Abrams, a nationally prominent black progressive, hit that mark per the exit poll. Indeed, her 90% was slightly higher than Biden’s 88%. She lost because she could not replicate Biden’s margins among college-educated whites and the area’s Latino and Asian voters.
Biden won because he received 44% of the college white vote and nearly 60% of Latinos and other nonblack voters of color. Abrams obtained only 36% of white college votes and 53.5% of Latinos, Asians and voters of mixed or another race.
This can be best observed in Fulton County’s four northernmost cities — Roswell, Johns Creek, Alpharetta and Milton. This area, known as Milton County before being absorbed into Fulton in 1931, is largely a mix of affluent whites and suburban Latinos and Asians.
It voted for Biden 51.9 to 46.8, data on Dave’s Redistricting App show. Gov. Brian Kemp, however, beat Abrams by 10 points in his 2022 re-election victory.
These factors combined show how narrow the Democratic path to victory is. Harris must win close to 90% of the black vote and motivate them to turn out in large numbers and replicate Biden’s showing among college-educated whites and nonblack voters of color. Miss the mark on any one of these factors and Trump wins the state.
So it wouldn’t be surprising to see Harris de-emphasize Georgia once the race begins in earnest. She does not need to win Georgia to triumph; her time and money are better spent contesting the more favorable terrain in Nevada and the blue-wall states in the Upper Midwest.
Unless she shocks pundits by picking Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock — the former pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — as her running mate, Georgia may turn into a second-tier target by mid-October.
Trump is by no means assured of winning the Peach State. Given the state’s still-strong GOP tilt and the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration here, Trump starts the final stage of the campaign with a clear, albeit narrow, edge.
Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
