Georgia has gone from luxury to necessity for Democrats

When Bill Clinton won the state of Georgia in 1992, he didn’t really need it. Even without the Peach State, Clinton would have walked away with 357 electoral votes — a blowout by modern standards. He lost the state in 1996, but again, it didn’t really matter.

Jump forward about three decades, however, and Georgia has turned from a luxury for Democrats to a necessity. True, Georgia’s governor has been a Republican since 2002. But Democrats have had plenty of wins too. In 2020, the U.S. Senate seats won by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock handed Democrats the slimmest of Senate majorities: 50 seats plus Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. Two years later, Warnock’s even bigger win in 2022 — thanks in part to the trainwreck that was Herschel Walker — helped them keep it.

Georgia is also moving closer to the tipping point: the state that puts a presidential candidate over 270 electoral votes. Between 1984 and 2012, Georgia voted 10.3 points to the right of the tipping-point state, on average. But between 2016 and 2024, that difference dropped to R +1.8. Joe Biden won the state by 0.2 points in 2020, similar to his 0.9-point win in what were technically the tipping-point states: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And although Harris lost Georgia, it actually moved even closer to the tipping point. (Harris lost it by 2.2 points, compared to 1.7 in the tipping point of Pennsylvania.)

But while the dream of turning Georgia blue has come true for Democrats — at least sometimes — it hasn’t really been part of a broader shift in the Sun Belt. Instead, the previously purple state of Florida has moved further out of Democrats’ grasp, Texas has been at best a tease for Democrats — Trump won it by nearly 14 points in 2024 — and Arizona moved further away from the tipping point last year, even as Georgia moved closer.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/georgia-has-gone-from-luxury-to-necessity