A State’s Transition from Red to Purple: Is Georgia Becoming the New Virginia?

The 2020 presidential election will be studied by political scientists and historians due to the wildly unusual circumstances and results. In the midst of a pandemic, voters in both political parties turned up in record numbers, whether by mail or in-person. Due to the high volume of Democratic mail-in ballots that were not yet counted by election night, a “red mirage” appeared for President Trump on election night, followed by a blue win for Joe Biden once all the ballots were counted. Leading up to election night, President Trump laid the foundation for convincing Americans that mail-in voting was fraught with risks of fraud, and if he lost due to the mail-in votes, his loss would be illegitimate. Since the November 4th election, President Trump and his supporters have filed at least 30 lawsuits in states in which he has lost, with most of the suits summarily dismissed due to lack of evidence of fraud. Many of these claims were filed in Republican-led states and or have Republican secretaries of state responsible for counting votes and certifying results who are being pressured by prominent Republicans and the Trump campaign to not certify the election results due to their claims that votes were cast fraudulenlty. One of those states is Georgia which produced a razor-thin margin of victory for Joe Biden. This is remarkable as the last time Georgia voted for a Democrat in the presidential race was 1992 when Bill Clinton was challenging George HW Bush. Before that race, in 1980, Georgia voted for their hometown president Jimmy Carter over Republican Ronald Reagan. Did the 2020 win for a Democratic presidential candidate in Georgia signify the beginning of a trend for Georgia to become a purple state or was this win simply an aberration attributable to a once-in-a-lifetime election with a once-in-a-lifetime candidate?

First, to understand what is happening in Georgia, we have to analyze what happened in Virginia. Virginia has been considered a swing state for most of recent political history, dating back to 1972. Although Virginia was deemed a swing state, it could be argued it has not been a swing state since 1972. Virginia from 1972 to 2004 in presidential elections went consistently for the Republican every time. However, this changed in 2008 when then-candidate Barack Obama won the state of Virginia. Since 2008, the state has consistently been blue in presidential elections. How did the state that had voted for the Republican president in the past three decades completely turned around in a little over a decade? The answer may lie in the changing demographics of Virginia.

Virginia has nearly six million people registered to vote when looking at Virginia’s population of over eight and a half million people. Virginia’s ethnic demographics slightly above average compared to the national average with a white population at 61.5%. The African-American population is above average at 19.1%, and Virginia slightly above average in the Asian population at 6.8%. Although those numbers would likely indicate Virginia would vote more Republican than Democrat, there are interesting trends that favor Democrats heavily. One of the more important trends is immigration to Virginia, which on average has 76% of incoming immigrants being non-white. The largest demographics who are immigrating to Virginia foreign-born immigrants, largely from the Asian and Latin American areas of the world. Most of these changes and population growth can be found largely in Northern Virginia. This can largely be attributed to a considerable amount of suburbanization happening in Northern Virginia. Presidential elections have consistently been decided by the voting strongholds of Northern Virginia, the greater Richmond area, and the Virginia Beach area. All these regions vote heavily Democrat. This was revealed in 2016, Donald Trump won the vast majority of Virginia counties with 93 counties of Virginia’s entire county count of 133. However, he still lost Virginia in 2016. Exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election proves this point as Biden is significantly winning in Northern Virginia, the greater Richmond area, and the Virginia Beach area. This shows how the diverse States like Virginia are increasingly going away from the Republicans to the Democrats.

As Georgia for most political scientists is a mystery of why the state ended up voting in the presidential election for Joe Biden. Georgia, by ethnic demographics, has some similar numbers to Virginia. Although one important factor is Georgia, has a population of over ten and a half million people compared to Virginia’s eight and a half million people. Of those 10+ million people, the white population is 60% of the state population, the African-American population is 32.6% of the population, and the Asian population is 4.4%. This clearly has some differences. One of the biggest changes that may be why Georgia turned blue is due to one person’s work, Stacy Abrams. Abrams is the Georgia House minority leader and ran for the governorship in 2018 against then-Secretary of State and now Governor Brian Kemp. She lost her bid for the governorship by less than 55,000 votes after at that time some would call vote suppressing legislation put forth by Kemp. Since then, Abrams has made it her mission to add more voices to the electorate through many registering voters’ drives. Many in the Democratic Party consider her the reason Georgia turned blue. Her efforts, along with the state’s history of suppressing African-American votes, could be in part of the reason Georgia flipped. Considering that in 2020 African-American voters in predominantly African-American pre-sinks or more likely to have longer wait times to vote even with higher registration numbers indicate an earlier tradition, especially in the south of voting suppression. This could have been a motivating factor for many African-American voters to vote in 2020 in record numbers. According to exit polls, Joe Biden did extremely well in the Atlanta metro area, this is expected as the Atlanta Metro area as well as the Atlanta suburbs are Democrat strongholds. These two areas make up 48% of the state’s total population. However, the reason Joe Biden was put over the top was his competitiveness in other state areas. These factors piling up gave Joe Biden the slight victory in Georgia.

Going back to whether Georgia was becoming a new Virginia, it seems it was more of a perfect storm. It’s important to consider that this election had two important factors for the reasons why people voted. The first was the coronavirus, and the second was Donald Trump. Considering that in the exit polls, when asked whether the person was voting for the candidate, they voted for work against the opposition candidate. Democrats dominated the category of against the opponent, with 69% voting against the opposition. Also in the exit polls of the voters who considered coronavirus the top issue they were voting on Joe Biden led by 78%. This must be considered significant as the election is one of the most unusual we have seen in history, with many absentee ballot votes and Donald Trump claiming it’s a fraudulent way to vote. His claim may ultimately stop him from winning the election, as the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger claimed nearly 24,000 people who voted for Trump in the Republican primary didn’t vote for him in the election. His constant claims of fraudulent absentee ballots may have cost him a 10,000 vote victory.

In conclusion, Georgia has come a long way in its diversity, and voters turn out that the 2020 election was a significant result. However, it hasn’t come far enough in the trends currently to show it will soon become more of a toss-up purple state, then a red state. As a native Virginian, you could see the changes happening for this shift from solid, the red sold blue. Georgia has made significant progress on its trends towards being a toss-up state. With the 2020 election as massive of an anomaly as it’s, it’s likely that Georgia’s next presidential election will be solidly in the Republican column.

Blake Hollier Student at The Catholic University of America

Resident Virginian