The States That Flipped From Trump in 2020 — And How They Could Shape Up in 2024 #2: Georgia
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Part 6: Finale
Six states that Donald Trump won the electoral votes for in the 2016 presidential election flipped (or in the case of Nebraska, partially shifted) to Joe Biden in the 2020 election. One of Nebraska’s five Electoral College votes went to Biden. The five states that went from red to blue for president are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In this series of posts, I will look at recent political history of these states and current partisan trends. With a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 looking increasingly likely, this series of posts will largely assume that that will be the case and make some sense of whether these states will stick with Biden or flip back to Trump. (Now that Nikki Haley is out of the race, a rematch between Biden and Trump in 2024 is all but assured pending lawsuits over Trump’s candidacy.)
Today’s post is the second post of the series and focuses on Georgia, The Peach State.
Georgia and Recent Presidential Elections
If you look at more recent presidential election history for Georgia and compare it to the first state in this series, Arizona, you’ll find that they have followed a somewhat similar path. Below are charts comparing the two states’ votes for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Vote margins that are red and negative mean that a Republican won; positive and blue vote margins indicate a Democrat won.
(Positive and negative percentages are not value judgments on the candidates. They are just to demonstrate the direction that an election went.)
Before the 2020 election, the last time that Georgia was won by a Democratic presidential candidate was 1992; for Arizona, it was 1996. In both states, the margin of victory for Republican candidates decreased from 2004 to 2008, increased from 2008 to 2012, and decreased again from 2012 to 2016. Both states saw a huge surge of total voters from 2016 to 2020. And finally, Democrats flipped both states in 2020, winning with incredibly close margins: 10,457 votes in Arizona (0.31% margin) and 11,779 votes in Georgia (0.24% margin).
Both states’ 2020 results were somewhat of a surprise given their track record in previous presidential elections. Though in the final days before Election Day, all three of The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball either shifted or kept their rating of Arizona and Georgia at “Tilt Democratic/Lean Democratic.” (The exception was Cook keeping rating Georgia as a toss-up.) So, they were not totally unexpected losses by any means.
What exactly happened? Where did Joe Biden make up the deficit in 2020 that Hillary Clinton had in 2016? Like with Arizona, we turn our attention to the county level of Georgia. But it won’t be as easy this time: While Arizona has 15 counties, Georgia has 159 of them — over 10 times the number.
That’s too many counties to include in this post, so I will share a link to the table I made here. I will list some of the most pertinent topline data points and a portion of that table in this post. But first, I must make a couple notes of clarification:
- When accounting for the size of voter populations in each county, I used Georgia’s designation of “active” voters instead of registered voters. I am not sure of the exact criteria for denoting a voter as “active” in Georgia, but it suggests that a voter is more frequent and, as a result, more likely to vote again.
- I also did not find the active voter numbers for the date of the 2020 election. Thus, I used the latest data as of this post, which is for March 4, 2024. Of course, the number of total voters changes over time, and this may have led to changes in which counties have more voters than others. But the data for March 4, 2024, still serves as a good estimation and won’t be too far off from what 2020 looked like in terms of each county’s number of active voters. The order of counties from most-to-least active voters is still going to look largely if not the exact same.
Here are some of the highlights from the full table of the 159 counties.
- Biden outperformed Clinton in the 34 counties with the most active voters (even though Trump still won 19 of them in 2020). Expanding that further, Biden outperformed Clinton in 46 of the 47 counties with the most active voters. In other words, Biden either expanded his own lead or cut into Trump’s lead in the top 34, and 46 of the top 47, counties with the most active voters.
- Biden outperformed Clinton in 85 counties total, ranging from 0.1 to 16.1 percentage points (Column J). Trump in 2020 outperformed himself in 2016 in only 72 counties, ranging from 0.1 to 7.9 percentage points. (In Butts and Polk Counties, Trump’s performance was basically the same in both years in terms of vote margin.)
Here are several snapshots of different top 10s from the table.
If you were to look at a map of Georgia and how each county voted for president, you would see a lot of red. That’s common across the United States: Rural and/or lower population counties often lean Republican, while more urban and/or higher population counties often lean Democrat. Cities generally lean Democrat, and they naturally tend to be in higher population counties by default. In Georgia in 2020, Trump won 129 of the 159 counties. He even flipped one that Clinton won in 2016 away from Biden in 2020 (Burke County).
But many of those counties were with lower numbers of active voters. And even when Trump did win a county, he sometimes underperformed in it compared to his 2016 vote share. Winning those wasn’t enough to overcome the improvements Biden made in the counties with higher numbers of active voters.
Take Cherokee County, for example, the most-populated county with active voters that Trump won (6th among all counties). Trump won it handily in both 2016 and 2020. But while he won it in 2016 by 49.1 percentage points, he “only” won it by 39.2 points in 2020, a 9.9 point difference. Other populous counties like Forsyth (9th among all counties) and Hall (10th) that Trump won in both elections tell a similar story.
- Forsyth County: 46.9 point margin in 2016, 33.2 point margin in 2020
- Hall County: 50.0 point margin in 2016, 43.2 point margin in 2020
If Trump wants to win in 2024, he’ll need to start by improving in those higher population counties. And there are a lot of them that can be tackled. The most populated county where Trump performed better in 2020 than 2016, Bulloch County, is 35th in most active voters with 45,530 (as of March 4, 2024). So, there’s a lot of work for his campaign to do.
Could Other Elections in Georgia Suggest How 2024 Will Pan Out?
In the article on Arizona I wrote, I detailed how election results from other offices in a state can give some useful data in predicting how it will vote for president — but that pitfalls also come with that. Without repeating those points verbatim, here are the summaries of those issues:
- Every race has different underlying factors (e.g., the candidates themselves, strategies, spending, the issues) influencing how they play out.
- Elections from different kinds of election years have different levels of voter turnout (e.g., midterms have lower rates of voter turnout than presidential elections), meaning different sets of voters are influencing the results in different years.
- Elections might not cover the same geographical areas (e.g., governor’s elections are statewide, state house seats are divided into districts).
With those caveats in mind, what could these other elections potentially tell us?
Governor
Georgia has not elected a Democratic governor since Roy Barnes in 1998. That’s six years more recent than the last time the state went to a Democratic presidential candidate, but 26 years is still forever ago in politics. (Barnes ran unsuccessfully in 2002 and 2010.)
Here are how many votes Democratic and Republican candidates for governor have garnered in every election since 1998.
While Georgia’s governorship was decidedly won by Barnes in 1998, Sonny Perdue (2002 and 2006) and Nathan Deal (2010 and 2014) flipped the script and won decisive victories for the Republican Party. It wasn’t until the first matchup between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams in 2018 that the governor’s race became a barnburner. But when Kemp and Abrams went head-to-head again in 2022, the results left no doubt as Kemp extended his margin of victory by 6.15 percentage points from 2018 to 2022.
What was the difference? Election results are virtually always about more than one key factor, but the timing of each suggests that there was some reaction to who was the president at the time. Though Georgia sided with Trump in 2016, one could argue that Kemp’s close call in 2018 portended Trump’s eventual loss in the state in 2020. Being the same party, Democrats often lumped Kemp and Trump together — a common strategy by both the Republicans and Democrat Parties when the presidential candidate is facing a lot of blowback, even when the presidential election is in a different year than governor.
That seems to have been at least a fairly successful strategy in closing the gap between Kemp and Abrams, even if Kemp still ultimately won, as 2018 was far closer than at least the five previous gubernatorial elections. But Kemp performed significantly better in 2022 against the same opponent, with Trump out of office and Biden the new president.
Does that mean that 2022 voters were reacting negatively to Biden like they did to Trump in 2018? For some voters, that was the case. Governor and presidential races for a particular state are both statewide races, so they both have the same electorate — that is, every Georgia voter can vote in both the gubernatorial and presidential elections. Therefore, there is some comparability.
But midterm and presidential election years get much different levels of turnout. While midterm election voters are very likely to vote in the presidential election, the reverse isn’t necessarily true. Like most states, Georgia elects its governor in midterm elections.
And even though both 2018 and 2022 pitted Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams against each other, they weren’t the same situation. Kemp had also shown a willingness to buck Trump (as did Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger) on the results of the 2020 election and Trump’s claims that it was stolen. Both have continued to do so.
Kemp survived a primary against a Trump-backed challenger in 2022, and the fact that Kemp had opposed Trump may have endeared Kemp to some voters who originally voted against him in 2018 (or would have if they had been registered to vote then). Democratic attempts to tie Kemp to Trump would be far less effective in 2022 than in 2018 as a result. Kemp winning his primary also suggests that not enough Republicans were mad enough about his opposition to Trump to go against him in the general election by either staying home and not voting, or voting for a 3rd party candidate.
That said, Kemp’s improved performance for the Republican Party in 2018 indicates that there may be some trouble ahead in Biden’s quest to win the state again in the 2024 presidential election. The 2020 election was already close enough that it wouldn’t have been a guarantee that Biden would win it again. But now that Biden is in office, there may be enough backlash and restored support for Trump to cause problems for Democrats.
On the other hand…
U.S. Senate
Recent U.S. Senate elections have been more on Democrats’ side. After a 2000 special election for a U.S. Senate seat (which was technically nonpartisan but won by Zell Miller, who otherwise identified as a Democrat), Republicans had won six straight elections for U.S. Senate in Georgia. Several of those contests were blowouts.
But in 2020, the partisan tides turned. Georgia actually had two U.S. Senate elections to go along with the presidential election between Trump and Biden. And both elections had to go to a runoff in January 2021. In Georgia general elections, if none of the candidates for an office have a majority of votes, the top two vote getters go to a runoff election on a later date.
One of these U.S. Senate races was a special election: Incumbent Johnny Isakson resigned due to health reasons in 2019, and Governor Brian Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler to fill the vacancy. Loeffler had to win a special election in 2020 to serve the rest of Isakson’s term. But she would lose to Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Then there was incumbent David Perdue, who won election to his seat in 2014, in a regularly-scheduled election. Perdue came close to winning in the general election, but came up less than 0.3 percentage points shy of avoiding a runoff. If Libertarian Shane Hazel had not been in the running to take 2.32% of the vote, Perdue may have won reelection (though there is no way to know for sure). Regardless, a runoff did happen, and Perdue was defeated by Jon Ossoff. Ossoff had originally made a name for himself in federal politics in a hotly contested (and VERY expensive) special election for U.S. House in 2017, losing to Karen Handel.
Where those results aberrations that were influenced by Trump’s name being on the ballot the same year? To some extent, that is certainly the case. But even with Trump out of office in 2022, Warnock won election to a full term in the U.S. Senate in an even tighter contest than against Loeffler. This time, Warnock defeated Herschel Walker, the former University of Georgia and NFL running back most associated with the Dallas Cowboys (ew, the Cowboys).
Since U.S. Senate elections happen every six years, they can regularly happen in both midterm and presidential elections. They become most comparable to presidential races when they are on the same ballot (e.g. 2020). And the last time that happened in Georgia, Democrats won both in close contests.
State Legislature
Now what about the state legislature? In Georgia, both the state house and state senate have all their seats up for election every two years, which is relatively uncommon in U.S. state legislatures. So, they happen in both presidential and midterm election years.
The tricky part, however, is the geographical differences. Sure, every voter will have a state house and state senate election to vote in, just like they all do for the governor, U.S. Senate, and president. But unlike those elections, each state legislative seat only covers a small region of the seat. Republican and Democratic voters also aren’t divided evenly across districts, so the partisan divide in the legislature is not necessarily reflective of the partisan divide in the voting population.
Still, let’s take a look at how many Republicans and Democrats have been elected in recent state legislative races anyway.
The general trend from 2012 to 2022 has shown a Republican majority slowly whittling down, although both the house and senate in Georgia are still decisively red. That does somewhat track with how the vote margin in presidential elections have gone for the state — the margin of victory for Republicans for president decreased from 2012 to 2016, and then turned into a close loss in 2020.
Will the trend continue for the state legislature and the president in 2024? As of now, that’s anyone’s guess.
The Partisan Affiliations of Georgia Voters
Georgia does not track the political affiliation of voters, so it is more difficult to gauge how registered voters are divided by Republican and Democrat in the state. But even with recent Democratic successes, that doesn’t mean that they suddenly outnumber Republicans. So, we have to gauge the partisan divide among voters by other means.
In the section titled “Georgia and Recent Presidential Elections” in this post, I noted how much of the state looks red, but this is mostly due to lower population and rural counties, which is common across the country. As such, bastions of Republican support tend to be more spread out than those of Democratic support. The number of Republicans is likely higher than Democrats in Georgia, but probably not by that much.
More densely populated counties, the ones with cities, tend to lean Democratic. And it’s those areas where you see clusters of high Democratic support on maps. Major cities of Georgia and their counties include Atlanta (Fulton County), Augusta (merged with Richmond County), Columbus (merged with Muscogee County), Macon (merged with Bibb County), and Savannah (Chatham County). Each of those counties went decisively to Biden in the 2020 election, as shown in the following list.
- Bibb County: 61.39%
- Chatham County: 58.65%
- Fulton County: 72.59%
- Muscogee County: 61.41%
- Richmond County: 67.95%
2024 in Georgia: Who has the Advantage?
Georgia is not the safe state for Republicans that it once was, but it’d be an overreaction to definitively say that Georgia is a “purple” state at this point. Sure, most Georgia statewide elections since 2020 have gone to Democrats (three U.S. Senate elections and the 2020 presidential race). But that isn’t quite a discernible trend — not yet, at least. There hasn’t been enough time.
Still, it’s going to be a competitive state for president in 2024, just like it was in 2020. The latest ratings from Inside Elections, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Cook Political Report all have it as a toss-up for 2024. Those are from 2023, so we should have updated forecasts from those three organizations in the coming months. The toss-up prediction could change slightly leading up to November, but one thing is for certain: Neither the Trump nor the Biden campaigns can sleep on Georgia.
