Georgia’s Changing Demographics Turn GOP Stronghold More Democratic
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(Bloomberg) -- Forsyth County is an area of north central Georgia, long known as a place where Black people were not welcome. In 1912, White men avenging the rape and murder of a White teenage girl drove more than 1,000 Black residents out of the county — though not before lynching some of them.
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But in a sign of how much shifts in demographics across the South have changed Georgia’s politics in recent years, 34% of Forsyth voters picked Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock over his Republican challenger Herschel Walker. That’s almost double the 18% of the vote in the county that went for Democrat Barack Obama for president a decade ago.
In and around Georgia’s cities, an increasing number of professionals from industries such as technology, entertainment and finance are converging on this Sunbelt region, causing Republican areas like Forsyth County to join a shift in the state’s makeup, with major implications not just on politics but also the state economy.
“Atlanta has attracted a huge influx of educated professional workers moving from many parts of the country, including New England,” said Mikhail Melnik, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. “There has been a large influx of highly educated immigrants from Asia, countries like India, Korea, China. Many of these migrants, within the US and from abroad, have settled in the more affluent areas of north Atlanta and its suburbs, fundamentally changing those from a marginal Republican stronghold to a strong Democratic one.”
Georgia’s overall population is experiencing explosive growth. In 2010, the state’s total population was 9.6 million, and by 2020 it had grown by more than 1 million. The percentage of White voters decreased from 2004 to 2020 as the percentage of people of color in the electorate has increased, according to a May 2021 report from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a group that works for voting access rights.
Republicans Advantage
While Walker wasn’t able to run up the kind of big Republican vote he would have needed in places like Forsyth to defeat Warnock, the majority of the county remains White and Republican, and only about 5% of the county is Black. Others have diversified the area, with Asian-Americans making up 18% of the population and Hispanics nearly 10%.
In the past 10 years, the change toward a stronger Democratic vote has been evident. Among at least seven of the largest counties surrounding Atlanta, Republicans have either lost their advantage or narrowed their margin, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News comparing the recent runoff race with the 2012 elections in the state.
In a runoff following the 2020 race, Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff were elected to the US Senate. Tuesday’s results blunt Republicans’ ability to cast 2020 as a fluke, said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University.
“Democrats are going to take it to heart and use it as evidence that they are competitive,” she said. “They have won two statewide contests in a row.”
Black Panther
Atlanta is the home of the world’s busiest airport, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Georgia Tech, a large engineering school. That’s been attracting new startups and expansions, including the move of headquarters of NCR Corp. and new operations of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. to the area. It’s also become a Southern movie and television production hub, thanks to a generous production tax credit. Metro Atlanta is home to Tyler Perry Studios and Trilith Studios, where a number of Marvel hits, including Black Panther and Guardians of the Galaxy were filmed. Movie sets frequently snarl area traffic. Ozark, Stranger Things and The Walking Dead are among the television series shot in Georgia.
The state’s economy, including its relatively low cost of living and its film and technology sectors, is part of the story of its increasing political competitiveness. It has lured White liberal voters from the Northeast and West Coast in particular, who have become a key voting block for Democrats. Blacks made up more than half of Warnock’s vote share, but he needed the White liberal block to win, too.
The state’s racial and ethnic demographics began changing in 2000, with a growing Black population in the vanguard, followed by Latino and Asian populations 10 years later, Gillespie said.
“Even outside the economy, there were pull factors bringing people to the state at a different level of the class strata,” she said. “You had reverse migration, people coming back for ancestral ties or family or people just relocating to places where you would see a lot more Black people than where you came from and see a lot of Black people in positions of power. Your doctor could be Black. Your lawyer could be Black. Your dentist could be Black.”
One factor behind Georgia’s change has been migration from other urban areas to Atlanta to take advantage of lower costs and job growth. Between 2015 and 2019, New York, Miami and Chicago accounted for the largest share of moves, with an average of 8,300 relocating each year from the New York City area alone, according to an analysis by the Atlanta Regional Commission in July.
Pink State
Some Republicans saw hope in the November results, if not the Senate race. They include GOP political consultant Brian Robinson, who said he had warned his party for years that demographic changes would eventually make the state Democratic, with Republicans holding on to a White voters and Democrats a coalition of everybody else. The Republicans’ November sweep of state offices changed that, suggesting that the GOP is now getting at least some support from non-White voters, he said.
University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock also said the state remains at least pink, despite Warnock’s win, with Republicans controlling every state constitutional office and the legislature. He said the party could likely have flipped Warnock’s Senate seat without a runoff had it put up a different candidate than Walker, who faced concerns about his truthfulness and personal character. “The electorate that showed up in November was Republican,” Bullock said.
Still, the high water mark for Georgia Republicans was about 15 years ago, when they were regularly getting 60% or more of the vote and when many Democratic politicians switched parties. Democrats hit bottom a few years later, when the executive director of the state party was indicted and sent to prison.
Other states are experiencing similar changes. In North Carolina, a boom in finance and high-tech jobs in recent years as companies like Apple Inc. and Toyota Motor Corp. have moved in has changed demographics and turned a once reliable Republican state into a critical swing state. In November, incumbent Republican Ted Budd narrowly defeated Democrat Cheri Beasley, in a race to fill a Senate seat that had been held by a Republican.
‘All Democrats’
Gwinnett County northeast of Atlanta is the poster child for the change. Once nearly 64% White, it became majority non-White in 2009, according to the US Census. It is now the most diverse county in Georgia and one of the most diverse in the US.
“At one point every elected official in Gwinnett was a Republican, and now they are almost all Democrats,” Bullock said.
In 2000, Gwinnett went to former President George W. Bush by nearly 64%. It flipped Democratic for the first time in 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a narrow plurality of its vote that year. It never looked back. Warnock won Gwinnett with 62% of the vote on Tuesday. Young voters also turned.
Although Republicans probably could have won with another candidate, the fact that Democrats have again delivered in the Senate race means Georgia is going to get a lot of attention in the presidential election.
“We may even be the biggest prize in terms of electoral votes among swing states,” Bullock said. “One could make the case that Florida is moving increasingly red and we have more electoral votes than the other swing states like Michigan, Arizona or Nevada.”
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