Georgia’s electoral votes aren’t likely to decide the 2020 election. But the “Empire State of the South” will live up to that 19th-century moniker with an outsize role in national politics in the final months of the 2020 election.
There will be some swing states that have been ravaged by the coronavirus with reopenings plagued by controversy; there will be some swing states roiled by the police killings of black men and the swirling protest movements they have spawned; and there will be some swing states facing allegations of voter suppression and questions over the electoral integrity of the ballot box.
Georgia has all three.
The state’s centrality to the 2020 election isn’t just limited to the presidential race. Georgia is the only state where there are two U.S. Senate seats up for grabs, and both are competitive. Further, it has two competitive House races in metro Atlanta, prime demonstrations of the catastrophic collapse of the Republican Party in the suburbs under President Trump.
Georgia in 2020 is a perfect example of how, and how quickly, things can change.
For most of the 21st century, Georgia has been a Republican stronghold. The state has not elected a Democratic senator since 2000, a Democratic governor since 1998, or backed a Democratic presidential candidate since 1992. Although Democrats maintained bastions among rural white voters in the state longer than in other parts of the South, those have been eroded to the point that Republicans now run up landslide margins in much of rural Georgia south of Macon. But the countervailing movement has the growth of metro Atlanta sprawling out further and further across the state.
A majority of Georgians now live in the metro Atlanta area, and its growth is not due to any one factor. It is a thriving economic hub that draws white-collar workers from across the country and immigrants from across the world. With this economic growth and cultural change has come a vast political transformation as well. In 2016, two of metro Atlanta’s most prosperous suburban counties, Gwinnett County and Cobb County, both voted for Hillary Clinton. It was the first time that either county had supported a Democratic presidential candidate since native son Jimmy Carter’s winning presidential bid in 1976.
This political shift proved to be enduring and not a fluke in 2017 when suburban Atlanta saw perhaps the most hotly contested special election in American history. After Republican incumbent Tom Price resigned for an ill-fated stint in the Trump Cabinet, it spurred a special election in his district, based in these prosperous suburbs. Although Democrat Jon Ossoff narrowly lost, it proved the concept that a political shift had happened in a district where Price had won by 23 percentage points in 2016 but Trump only edged out a 1-point margin over Clinton. In the 2018 midterm elections, Lucy McBath succeeded where Ossoff fell short and enabled Democrats to win the congressional seat held by Newt Gingrich only a generation before.
This was only reinforced the next year when Stacey Abrams fell just short in her quest to become the state’s first African American governor. Abrams showed that Democrats didn’t just have a path to victory in the suburbs of Atlanta, but that it could be replicated statewide and put the state’s 16 electoral votes in play.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Abrams argued that the political shifts in Georgia were finally reflected at the ballot box. “We’ve seen these movements happening, we’ve known these changes were occurring, but we hadn’t seen the level of investment necessary to reveal what was possible. And what we did in my campaign was truly invest for the first time on the Democratic side of the aisle in every community.”
This year, Georgia is one of 15 states covered by a nearly $300 million ad reservation placed by the Biden campaign over the last two months of the election. But Republicans aren’t taking anything for granted. Trump is also active in the state and has deep ties to it. David Perdue, the incumbent senator up for reelection, is perhaps Trump’s closest ally in the Senate, and the president’s political operation is studded with operatives with Georgia ties, including Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s former chief of staff, and Brian Jack, the White House political director. Trump’s endorsement is credited with delivering incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp the Republican nomination in 2018, and he helped Kemp over the top against Abrams with a rally in Macon just 36 hours before polls opened in November.
Republicans will also be helped, ironically, by the major mishandling of a Senate race in which the party ended up with a splintered field when it seemed it could least afford it. While Georgia has a regularly scheduled Senate race in which Perdue seeks reelection against Ossoff, there is also a special election created by the resignation of longtime incumbent Johnny Isakson. That will take the format of a “jungle primary,” with the top two finishers in November facing off in a January runoff. And it has gotten messy.
Kemp appointing Kelly Loeffler, a major Republican donor and wife of Jeffrey Sprecher, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, to replace Isakson spurred the initial drama. Loeffler was chosen over Doug Collins, an ardent Trump defender during impeachment who represents a ruby-red district in North Georgia. Collins soon decided to challenge the appointed incumbent in a rare intraparty fight.
The hope was that Loeffler, as a woman without a political profile, would help win back wavering suburban voters. That didn’t happen. Loeffler was almost immediately immersed in a scandal after selling millions of dollars in stocks following a congressional briefing on the coronavirus in March. The Senate ethics panel dropped its investigation in June, but it forced her to run hard to the right and caused new headaches. Over the next couple of months, the WNBA team Loeffler owns, the Atlanta Dream, began to push back on its owner over her claims that Black Lives Matter seeks to “destroy America.” Atlanta has been a consistent hub of protests over police violence. Players showed up to the arena in shirts advertising Loeffler’s most prominent Democratic opponent. Although Loeffler has managed to survive the scandal and remain competitive in the race, helped by her own deep pockets and national Republican support, it’s transformed her into a fully fledged Trump acolyte. She and Collins have gone back and forth, each claiming more ardent allegiance to the president and trying to paint the other as a RINO (Republican in name only).
But not only has the ugliness created two well-funded campaigns targeting only the most ardent conservatives, it’s also given Republicans a chance of locking out Democrats in a runoff. Currently, Collins and Loeffler are running first and second in polls for the race, ahead of a three-way split in the Democratic field. If that doesn’t change, it’ll show that even a disorganized GOP retains home court advantage in Georgia, for now.
National and state Democrats tried to avoid this by anointing Raphael Warnock, the successor to Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, as the standard-bearer, but he has been unable to consolidate the field. In most polls, he runs in fourth place, behind Matt Lieberman, the son of former vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman, and ahead of former U.S. attorney Ed Tarver. Democratic strategists have griped about Warnock’s minimal presence the airwaves and expressed anxiety about an incident in which he ran over his wife’s foot with his car. The result is that the special election, which should have been more competitive than the state’s other Senate race, is looking less so.
In that other race, Ossoff, taking advantage of his national profile, has gone after Perdue over his ties to Trump in a state the president won in 2016. Although national Republicans have long been skeptical of the Democratic nominee, a CBS/YouGov poll from the end of July shows a race within the margin of error and the potential for Ossoff to ride Joe Biden’s coattails to victory. Ossoff described Georgia as “the most competitive race in the country” and insisted “the Senate majority will be decided here” in an interview with the Washington Examiner. He linked Perdue, who has faced scrutiny of his own over stock transactions, to Loeffler, saying that both “were too busy lining their pockets to prepare the country for the most severe public health crisis in a century.”
In the meantime, Ossoff has been helped by Perdue’s own stumbles, including a digital ad run by the incumbent that photoshopped a bigger nose onto Ossoff, who would be the first Jewish senator from Georgia if elected. Perdue apologized and blamed an outside vendor.
The state’s two competitive House races will be yet another testing ground. In the 6th District, McBath seeks to hold her seat against Karen Handel in a rematch of their 2018 race. Both are well-known quantities in the district. Handel has been a presence on the ballot in Georgia for over a decade, while McBath came to prominence as a gun control activist after her son was murdered in 2012. But far more interesting will be the open seat in the next-door district, Georgia’s 7th. While Georgia’s 6th is emblematic of the suburban shift, a majority white district where country-club Republicans have revolted against Trump, Georgia’s 7th is a majority-minority district with significant African American, Hispanic, and Asian American communities. It is an open seat after incumbent Rob Woodall, who barely eked out a win in 2018, decided not to seek reelection. The incumbent was somehow caught napping in a district that, in a vacuum, operatives in both parties would have pegged as more competitive than the 6th. Carolyn Bourdeaux, the Democrat who narrowly lost in 2018, is running again, this time against Rich McCormick, a doctor who has tied himself closely to Trump and is running as an unabashedly MAGA candidate. Although Trump won the district by a 6-point margin, Abrams won it by 1.5 points. For Republicans, the district will be a canary in the coal mine for Trump’s hopes. A Democratic win there is a sign that Biden is not just holding on to Romney-Clinton voters but turning out new voters as well.
Such turnout would be consistent with the 2020 primary, which far surpassed the 2018 primary, and there were more votes statewide for Democrats than Republicans on primary day. But there was also chaos at the polls, as lines stretched for hours and countless voters who requested absentee ballots never received them. It follows a host of issues in 2018 that led Abrams to question the result of the election after tens of thousands were purged from the rolls and certain polling lines were so long that some voters in those places, often heavily populated by African Americans, waited for hours. As a result, she described the state as “an epicenter for voter suppression” to the Washington Examiner.
These issues continued during the 2020 primary. Howard Franklin, a Democratic strategist in the state, said that he and his wife requested absentee ballots but never received them. The result was that his wife had to stand in line for five-and-a-half hours in order to vote. Democrats have since sued in an attempt to force Georgia to provide more polling places and emergency paper ballots in the event of issues with electronic voting machines.
One Republican strategist acknowledged that this could potentially be an issue if there are “delays and procedural issues” in November. However, the strategist argued “this really is an isolated issue. It’s an issue with Fulton and DeKalb Counties [two heavily Democratic and majority African American counties that include the city of Atlanta] and outside of those two, nobody really has any issues.”
These issues will be multiplied in the general election with Georgia’s past history of troubled administration compounded by the effects of the pandemic. With growing concern in recent weeks about the ability of people to vote by mail due to cuts (since suspended for now) to the U.S. Postal Service, the Peach State will be an early indicator for election irregularities in November.
But while Georgia is competitive, the question is whether it can truly be called a swing state yet. Many strategists in both parties have hesitated to place the state among the handful in the fulcrum of American politics, often calling it “light red” but not purple. November may change that. In Franklin’s view, “the way to enter the pantheon (of swing states) is for someone who wasn’t supposed to win an election to win.” If Biden or even Ossoff pulls off a win in November, then the Peach State will take its place next to states such as Wisconsin and Florida as perennial objects of national attention. And, even if that doesn’t happen, metro Atlanta will still have a lot of new registered voters by 2024.
Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
