Georgia has been an area of focus for Donald Trump since he narrowly lost it in 2020. This time around, polls suggest he won’t need to call state election officials after the election to collect votes — he has all the votes he needs to win on his own.
The former president, RealClearPolitics Poll Average Joe Biden has led the incumbent president since last year. Joe Biden has never led in the polls since November. If he had continued to run, the outcome would have been all but decided.
The entry of Vice President Kamala Harris into the race has narrowed Trump’s lead in the polls. In the two polls conducted since VP Harris’s surprise appearance, Trump has a 2.5-point lead. Removing all third-party candidates from the poll question narrows that lead to 1.5 points, suggesting that Trump could win in a head-to-head matchup. It wouldn’t be a landslide victory, but it would be enough to tip Georgia’s crucial 16 electoral votes in his direction.
Despite Biden’s performance in the state and Democrats’ three consecutive Senate victories, Democrats have an extremely narrow path to victory in the Peach State. No candidate won a majority in November’s election, and all won their seats in two-candidate runoff elections, which are not mandatory for the presidential election. Even a strong Democratic campaign would appear to be capped at Biden’s 2020 vote of 49.5%.
That’s largely due to the state’s large white rural population, which gives Republicans a big lead and whose influence has not been negated even by the impressive growth of metro Atlanta. Trump won more than 75% of the vote in 38 of the state’s 156 counties and gained in many more.
Democrats are doing well in the state’s smaller cities, including Savannah, Augusta and Athens, home to the University of Georgia, as well as winning in rural counties where blacks make up or are close to making up a majority of the electorate.
But even those strong areas don’t outweigh the rural white vote: Every county outside metro Atlanta voted 52% of the time in 2020, and Trump won handily with about 62% of the vote.
That makes Atlanta and its suburbs the state’s battleground. To win, Democrats need to win roughly 90% of the black vote, concentrated in Atlanta’s Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett, Clayton and DeKalb counties. But as Stacey Abrams’ losing 2022 gubernatorial election showed, that’s not enough.
Abrams, a nationally prominent black progressive, achieved that goal, according to exit polls: She received 90% of the vote, slightly more than Biden’s 88%. She lost because she was unable to replicate Biden’s share of the vote among college-educated whites and Latino and Asian voters in the region.
Biden won because he received 44% of the vote among white college students and about 60% of voters of color other than Latino and Black. Abrams won just 36% of the vote among white college students and 53.5% of voters who are Latino, Asian, multiracial or other race.
The trend is most pronounced in Fulton County’s four northernmost cities: Roswell, Johns Creek, Alpharetta and Milton. The area, which was called Milton County before it was absorbed into Fulton in 1931, is largely made up of affluent whites and suburban Latino and Asian residents.
Biden won the state by 51.9 to 46.8, according to data from the Dave’s redistricting app, but Gov. Brian Kemp held a 10-point lead over Abrams in his 2022 reelection bid.
Taken together, these factors show just how narrow the path to victory for Democrats is: Harris would need to win nearly 90% of the black vote. and Motivate them to come together in large numbers and Replicate Biden’s results among college-educated whites and non-black voters. If any one of these factors is missed, Trump wins the state.
So it’s no surprise that Ms. Harris is starting to downplay Georgia once the campaign gets underway. She doesn’t need to win Georgia to win, and her time and money would be better spent in more favorable terrain in Nevada and the Democratic-leaning upper Midwest.
Unless she shocks critics by selecting Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, a former pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, as her running mate, Georgia could become a secondary target by mid-October.
Trump’s victory in the Peach State is by no means a certainty, and given that the state remains strongly Republican and the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, Trump will begin the final stages of the campaign with a slight but clear advantage.
Political analyst and commentator Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
