Georgia - 2024 Election Compendium

Topic: 2024 Election Analysis

Georgia 2024 Presidential Election Review

Author’s Note: All 2024 Election Reviews can be found here.

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Outcome

Trump +2.2% (+115,100)

My Prediction

Trump +4.1% (+204,998)

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Preface

For most of this cycle, I considered Georgia a key ingredient for a Trump election win, and my assumption was that if he couldn’t get over the hump there, he would probably lack the steam to take the electoral votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. As it stands today, Trump would have won the election with North Carolina plus Arizona plus Nevada plus Pennsylvania, suggesting Georgia may be departing from previously established predictive traits as the Atlanta metro grows and wrecks statewide Republican political dreams, while the GOP benefits from crossover Hispanics in the Southwest and the overwhelming support of the white working-class in the Industrial Midwest.

Thanks to the massive distribution of mail-in ballots in the 2020 race, Biden’s 2020 Georgia victory will be forever tainted, all the way down to awkward moments like the one in which Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger hit the media circuit on November 4 and bragged about the record “4.7 million” turnout, just a couple weeks before the state certified almost exactly 5 million ballots.

Georgia does not register its voters by party. Shortly before the election, in an effort to discern likely shifts, I discovered the Duval County bellwether, which came online two decades ago. That Florida county, which contains metro Jacksonville, has served as a perfect mirror of Georgia since 2004, constantly sitting just left of the Peach State and swinging the same way, and its voter registration figures suggested it (Duval) was due for a solid move rightward:

Georgia moving rightward, along with Duval, from an 11,779 ballot Republican deficit in 2020 would mean certain victory for Trump, so I made my prediction that Trump would carry Duval, and with it, flip Georgia. I arrived at a 4.1% margin prediction in Georgia by splitting the difference between the average of my pessimistic model and the Duval model, and again splitting the difference between that average and the Duval model, which I considered most likely.

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Analysis

· Duval County, Florida, flipped to Donald Trump (+1.4%), and remained a perfect mirror of Georgia for the sixth straight presidential election. Duval shifted 5.2% to the right, with Georgia moving 2.4% right from its 2020 result, which appears artificially shortened based on what I will reveal throughout this report.

· 136 of 159 counties (85.5%) shifted more Republican from 2020, meaning those 136 were either won by a greater percentage margin, or lost by less of one. Notably, the musical chairs game in the suburban Atlanta counties continued, with black voters moving out of the urban core of Cobb, Gwinnett, Clayton, Fulton, and DeKalb Counties making the collar counties bluer or less red, and the major core counties drifting slightly rightward as a result. Many of these shifts are incremental or barely measurable, particularly in small counties. Republican and Democrat shifts by county shown below:

· I accurately predicted Baldwin and Washington Counties would flip to Trump, but did not forecast Jefferson County also doing so.

· The “Gang of Eight” Metro Atlanta Counties, those I identified with substantial voter registration increases stemming from Automatic Voter Registration’s implementation, gave margin shifts like this in terms of raw votes:

· Incredibly, George W. Bush won these eight counties collectively 20 years ago, back when Cobb, Gwinnett, and Henry Counties were heavily Republican and things weren’t so bad in core Atlanta. Fortunately, Trump stopped the bleeding here and wound up improving by 17,056 in margin, enough to evaporate Biden’s 2020 margin statewide. Cherokee and Forsyth Counties, although shifting slightly left in percentage margin, came up strong for Trump, and sagging black voter turnout in core Atlanta cost more margin for Harris. Only Henry County was a real boon for her, moving heavily Democrat because of continued demographic shifting.

· Referencing the above map – despite getting destroyed in the Deep South, falling below Clinton in Louisiana and Mississippi, and below Biden in South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida, while gaining only marginally in North Carolina, Harris gained 74,384 ballots over Biden’s 2020 total, which was already dubiously high in that it vaulted him over the highest single cycle Republican vote gain in 16 years, in a state that hadn’t backed a Democrat since 1992 (and even then, it was because H. Ross Perot cost Bush 41 the state that year).