GOP voters celebrate Donald Trump’s win at a Buckhead hotel Tuesday night. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
About an hour before polls closed Tuesday, Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon predicted a win for former president – and now president-elect – Donald Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“It looks like the trend that was established during early voting has continued,” he said. “We’re seeing very strong performances in rural Georgia counties, in exurban counties around Atlanta and other major metro areas around the state, so Republican turnout looks solid.”
“It actually looks on track to either meet or exceed 2020 levels,” he added. “Democratic turnout, not as strong. We’re not seeing those numbers out of DeKalb or Fulton or Chatham that you would expect to get the electorate in position for them to be competitive.”
Georgia’s 2024 numbers are still unofficial, but McKoon appears to have been right on the money.
In DeKalb, 369,686 voters cast a ballot by 7 p.m. Tuesday, down from 373,439 who voted in the 2020 election – a difference of less than 4,000 votes. And of those who did vote, Trump made marginal gains, rising from 15.7% of the vote in 2020 to 17.1% this year. Fulton and Chatham counties’ results are not yet fully tabulated.
While Harris seems to have underperformed in major metro counties, Trump appears to have expanded his 2020 lead in rural and exurban counties.
In Cherokee County, one of the richest sources of Republican votes in Georgia, the total vote grew from 145,539 ballots in 2020 to 163,326 in 2024, or about 18,000 votes, according to unofficial numbers, and Trump’s portion of the vote grew slightly from about 68.8% to 69.1%.
“We’ve shown the country that Georgia remains a red state, with big wins up and down the ticket,” said Georgia House Speaker Pro Tem Jan Jones, a Milton Republican, in a statement celebrating her party’s wins. “We will take this mandate from the voters to continue lowering taxes, protecting our neighborhoods and quality of life and providing more options for Georgia’s students to thrive.”
Those trends multiplied across Georgia’s 159 counties spelled defeat for Harris, but not the end of Georgia’s swing state status, said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.
“It’s sort of not a blowout,” he said. “I’d say it’s better than (Hillary) Clinton did, better than (Stacey) Abrams did in her second try. Indeed, I think (Harris) is closer than anybody who was running for a statewide constitutional office two years ago. Clearly not as good as (Sen. Raphael) Warnock, who had 49.4% in the general election. She’s at 48.5%. So, yeah, I think we would still be considered a toss-up state.”
As Georgians learned this year, toss-up status means major rallies and candidate appearances, sometimes multiple times in a week, as well as nonstop ads, mailers and texts from campaigns, all of which are likely to return for coming elections.
It may be cold comfort, but Georgia Democrats can take some solace in the fact that Harris performed poorly across the board, not just in Georgia, Bullock added. And while this race is over, there’s always a next time.
“The general pattern is for the president’s party not to perform that well in the midterms, so that can give Democrats some hope for 2026,” he said.
Sen. Jon Ossoff will be up for re-election in 2026. The governor’s mansion will also be up for grabs because Gov. Brian Kemp is in his second and final term.
Speaking on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Politically Georgia podcast Wednesday morning, state Democratic Party Chair Congresswoman Nikema Williams agreed the party needed to both do more to make gains in rural counties and run up the numbers in metro Atlanta.
“We have always said that Georgia was not a blue state or a red state. We were periwinkle, y’all,” she said. ”And now we have more work to do to make sure that voters understand that we’re fighting for them. I still contend that we were not fighting against Donald Trump to get voters to the polls. We were fighting against the couch. A lot of our voters simply stayed home. It was not so much that Democratic voters were choosing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. A lot of our voters stayed home, and we needed to get them to the polls. It’s as simple as that.”
The reasons why Harris failed to inspire voters to turn out are still fodder for Monday morning quarterbacking. Williams emphasized that Harris had a shortened amount of time to mount a campaign against Trump. She stepped in as the nominee after Biden stepped down a little over 100 days ago.
Biden himself may have been a heavy albatross around Harris’ neck. Polls heading into the election showed a majority of the country believed the country was on the wrong track. Trump seized the opportunity to connect Harris with the Biden administration, while Harris appeared reluctant to differentiate herself from the president.
Republicans point to what they call a racial or ethnic realignment. According to national exit polls published by the Washington Post, Trump made big gains among Latino men, growing from about 36% in 2020 to 55% in 2024.
The youngest group of voters, those between 18 and 29, also moved toward Trump in the same exit polls, with Harris’ advantage in that age range shrinking from plus-24 to plus-13 from Biden’s performance in 2020
Last fall, college campuses across the nation, including in Georgia, were rocked by widespread protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and subsequently by police crackdowns and censure from politicians.
Biden’s policy on Israel was among his least popular positions, and young people were considered most likely to support the Palestinian cause.
State Rep. Ruwa Romman, a Duluth Democrat, is Palestinian and Georgia’s first Muslim woman state legislator. She endorsed Harris despite being denied a speaking position at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August.
In a series of tweets early Wednesday, Romman blamed members of Harris’ inner circle for trying to appeal to moderate Republicans rather than giving the Democrats’ base voters what they wanted.
“Liz Cheney, Geoff Duncan, and others were never going to bring voters,” Romman said. “They don’t have a base. Prioritizing billionaires and Republicans instead of progressive orgs who do deep organizing work was a huge mistake. They’re the ones who push back on right wing disinformation.”
“Instead they were iced out and maligned,” she added. “This was supposed to be a historic moment but many tonight are reeling and terrified of what comes next. All of us lose tonight. All of us. There’s nothing good that will come of this.”
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