How Georgia could swing back to the GOP in 2024
The entire nation will vote on the next president of the United States this fall, but the election will likely come down to seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. With the outsized importance of these states, it's worth taking a closer look at the data we have in each of them — not just where the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stands today, but also each candidate's path to victory and what issues could tip the election. Our fourth state is the Peach State, Georgia, whose narrow flip to the Democratic column in 2020 helped secure President Joe Biden's victory.
The history
Georgia is a new battleground in the post-2000 "red state, blue state" era. While statewide races had not really been highly contested before then, it has since trended left compared to the country as a whole. In 2016, Trump carried the state by 5 percentage points, which was the state's closest margin in a presidential race over the past two decades until Biden won it by just 0.2 points — becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Subsequent elections have further confirmed Georgia's newfound competitive status. In January 2021, Democratic Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock narrowly claimed both of the state's Senate seats in runoffs, marking their party's first victories for that office in Georgia since 2000. Although Republicans recovered in the 2022 midterms to retain all of the state's executive posts — including governor — Warnock managed to win reelection that year against a Trump-endorsed candidate.
The 2024 polls
Heading toward November, then, Trump really needs to capture Georgia's 16 electoral votes to give himself a good shot at hitting the magic majority number of 270 nationally. Without knowing how other states will vote, 538's forecast suggests that Trump would have around a 3-in-4 shot at winning the presidency if he ends up carrying Georgia. But if Harris claims it, she would have about a 9-in-10 chance of becoming the next president.
And polls once again show an extremely close race in Georgia. Trump leads by about 1 point in 538's polling average of the state.* Although Trump holds a slight edge, his standing against Harris is significantly closer than it was against Biden, who trailed Trump by about 6 points when he stepped aside in late July.
The demographics
In 2020, the nearly 30 counties in the Atlanta metropolitan area constituted about 60 percent of Georgia's vote, making any shifts in that part of the state especially consequential. Biden's slim victory could be chalked up to him collectively carrying those counties by 15 points, nearly doubling Hillary Clinton's 8-point edge in 2016 against Trump, while doing only slightly better than Clinton in the rest of Georgia. Biden's winning coalition came largely from the sizable base of Black voters in the state as well as gains among white voters with a college degree, especially in and around Atlanta, while Trump relied heavily on voters in more rural or exurban parts of the state.
Like Biden, Harris will need overwhelming support — and solid turnout rates — from Black voters in Georgia. At nearly one-third of the population, the Peach State has the largest population and proportion of Black Americans of any of the seven main swing states. In 2020, about 30 percent of Georgia voters identified as Black, according to the exit polls, and around 90 percent backed Biden, about the same as Clinton's support level in 2016. However, turnout among Black voters in Georgia in 2016 and 2020 continued to be down somewhat from the record heights of 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was the Democratic presidential nominee.
Critically, recent polls suggest that Harris may be running shy of Biden's 2020 support level among this group: According to an average of crosstabs over the past month,** Harris has attracted a tad better than 82 percent of Black voters in Georgia. Meanwhile, Trump has pulled close to 15 percent, a small gain relative to his roughly 10 percent showing in 2020. Taken together, these potential shifts would notably improve Trump's chances of winning the state in 2024.
Trump can once again expect to win a sizable majority of white voters in Georgia, an edge he will have nationally and very strongly in the South, which has a higher degree of racially polarized voting than any other part of the country. Still, it's possible he might lose a little ground here in 2024: In 2020, Trump won about 70 percent of Georgia's white voters, but he's garnering about 66 percent among them over the past month of polls. For her part, Harris is pulling in around 31 percent, nearly identical to Biden's 30-percent haul in 2020.
But Georgia saw a sizable education split among its white voters last time around: In 2020, roughly 80 percent of white voters in Georgia without a four-year degree backed Trump (making up about 35 percent of the electorate). In contrast, Trump carried white voters with a college degree, which made up about a quarter of the state's vote, by a smaller margin of 11 points (55 percent voted for Trump and 44 percent backed Biden).
In Atlanta-area counties like Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb, more than 50 percent of the white population has at least a bachelor's degree, so how much Harris can recreate Biden's coalition (or those of Warnock's 2020 and 2022 races, for that matter) among these voters will be pivotal to the Georgia outcome. Recent polls that have data for college-educated voters have found Harris running at 53 percent, a bit shy of Biden's 57 percent, among the group as a whole (including voters of color).
Another wild card in the Georgia race will be its growing cohort of Hispanic voters, who made up a bit less than one-tenth of the state's 2020 electorate. In polling over the past month, this group's preferences look similar to four years ago, as Harris leads Trump by around 25 points — the same margin Biden enjoyed. As Georgia Latinos are somewhat more concentrated in the suburbs and exurbs of Atlanta than in the rest of the state — though the rural Hispanic population has also grown — they will be another factor in how the bluest part of the state breaks on Nov. 5.
The issues
In terms of the big issues in this election, Georgia's vote may rest especially on economic concerns. Based on September polling data from Redfield & Wilton/The Telegraph, 41 percent of Georgia voters named the economy as most important to their vote, the largest share of any swing state's voters to do so. And while abortion remains a major issue, being the second most commonly named top issue in each swing state, it appears to have slightly less salience in the Peach State: 17 percent named abortion as most important, below the 20 percent or more mark seen in most other swing states. After these, immigration ranked as the next most important with 8 percent.
As for which candidate Georgia voters trust to handle the issues, a late September survey from Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research for Fox News found Georgia voters relatively split on whether they trusted Harris or Trump more on the economy and making the country safe, with Trump maintaining a small edge of 3-to-4 points. Trump had a larger advantage on immigration, though: by a split of 56 percent to 41 percent, notably more voters trusted Trump to handle the issue that has long been central to his platform. Conversely, the only issue on which Harris had a huge edge was abortion, as 57 percent thought she'd do a better job on that issue compared with 39 percent who said Trump.
Another local topic of conversation has dominated headlines lately, and could have a big impact on when we'll know the results of the election: In September, Trump supporters on the state's board of elections controversially outvoted their colleagues to alter Georgia's vote-counting procedures less than two months before the election. Each precinct is now supposed to hand count the total number of ballots cast to see if the figure matches the machine count. This may not sound like a big deal, but hand counts are known to be less accurate than machines and much more time-consuming. As a result, this change — which is being challenged in court — could significantly delay Election Night vote reporting in Georgia.
Georgia voters seem aware of the likelihood that this rule would slow down the state's count, but they're not necessarily opposed to it. A late September survey from YouGov/CBS News found that around two-thirds of the state's registered voters had heard some or a lot about the change to the counting rules, and 63 percent thought that this would cause delays in tallying the votes on Election Day. Yet a slight majority (53 percent) felt the hand count would help make the results more accurate, while half felt it would reduce the risk of fraud in the election. Republicans were most likely to hold these views, in keeping with the Trump-sparked doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election among the GOP base, despite a lack of evidence for such fraud. Tellingly, 72 percent of Georgia Republicans in the same survey still did not view Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election in their state.
The downballot races
While Georgia is one of the key cogs in the presidential race, the state lacks much action of note in downballot contests. Neither of the state's U.S. Senate seats is up for election this year, and none of its 14 U.S. House races appear to be especially competitive. The state is also holding elections for state legislature, although Republicans hold solid majorities in both chambers that are unlikely to change significantly.
Footnotes
*All numbers in this article are as of Oct. 14 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern.
**Based on polls of likely and registered voters only (if a poll included results among both populations, we used likely voters). If a poll included both a head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump and a version including third parties, we used the head-to-head version. Crosstabs among groups defined by pollsters as "Latino" and "Hispanic" are both included in averages of Latino voters. Finally, if a polling organization (defined as a partnership between a pollster and sponsor, or a pollster alone if their work was not sponsored by an outside group) had more than one survey in the relevant time frame, only the most recent version was included. All polls conducted and released between Sept. 15 and Oct. 14 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern are included.
