Donald Trump won Georgia on Tuesday with a voting pattern as unique as he is.
The Republican lost once-solid Republican counties. He managed to expand the blue sheen of metro Atlanta and underperformed Mitt Romney’s effort in 2012. Yet Trump racked up bigger numbers in rural counties and Atlanta’s growing exurbs.
Put simply, Trump has scrambled the narrative in Georgia politics, perhaps forever.
“If you live in Marietta and you’re a Republican and you’re part of the establishment, you still think you’re the center of the Republican Party,” veteran GOP consultant Dan McLagan said. “But it’s shifted under their feet.”
Marietta and Cobb County are the perfect illustration of what occurred Tuesday in Georgia. Hillary Clinton — a Democrat — won Cobb County along with the once-Republican strongholds of Gwinnett and Douglas counties. Clinton also solidified Henry County’s transition from Republican to Democratic while outperforming President Barack Obama’s 2012 results in most metro Atlanta counties.
Overall, Clinton bettered Obama’s 2012 Georgia numbers by nearly 3 percent, while Trump was off Romney’s pace by less than 1 percent.
The shifts in performance were often dramatic. In urban, suburban and exurban counties, Clinton posted big gains for Democrats compared with four years ago. Everywhere else, however, she saw her numbers deflate.
“Last night, the ‘Two Georgias’ manifested their division,” Democratic strategist Jim Coonan said of Tuesday’s results. “The profile of white voters in the metro area (Republican and Democratic areas alike) diverges from the profile of white voters outside the metro area, where Clinton underperformed relative to Obama.”
The common refrain for Republicans for a generation in Georgia was that to win elections here you called on the party’s base in rural counties to hold the line and wait for big numbers to roll in from Cobb and Gwinnett to seal the deal.
Tuesday showed that Cobb and Gwinnett have been replaced by Cherokee and Forsyth counties, among others. While Cobb and Gwinnett gave Trump more raw votes, he had higher percentages in Cherokee and Forsyth.
House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, said those shifts have been coming for a while. Tuesday night just showed the movement of voters has accelerated.
“What we’ve been seeing for a few years in those counties is a changing demographic,” he said. “Some of (those) counties have become fairly reliable for Democratic candidates.”
Still, Ralston said he doubted Cobb and Gwinnett would swing to the Democrats so quickly. Voters in Gwinnett on Wednesday proved the county remains fairly split and that future elections may hinge on who the candidates are.
Ashish Biswah of Lilburn supported Clinton. “I’ve known her a long time,” he said. “I liked Bill Cliinton. Her policies are very good. We need Obamacare.”
But John Greindl of Norcross supported Trump. The primary reason: “He’s not Hillary.”
Tuesday also proved, however, that Georgia remains reliably Republican. Yes, Trump won the state with just 51.2 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns, but Clinton only took 45.74 percent. That, too, continues a trend of Democrats topping out at about 45 percent statewide.
Trump not only underperformed Romney in 2012, but he also trailed down-ballot candidates on Tuesday. U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson won 44,000 more votes than Trump as the Republican incumbent sailed to re-election with nearly 55 percent of the vote. In Cherokee County, for example, every Republican state lawmaker reaped a higher percentage of votes than Trump.
Ralston said that as exurb counties such as Cherokee grow, their importance to the GOP is growing, too. Starting today, the Republican formula for winning is rural counties and the exurbs.
“As we were traveling around the state helping candidates for the state House, there was tremendous enthusiasm for Donald Trump in rural Georgia,” Ralston said. “It was definitely more intense excitement than maybe in the suburban counties.”
As Republican control of some suburban areas wanes, Democrats have chances to take advantage. The party picked up a formerly Republican state House seat in Gwinnett and came within 232 votes of grabbing a second. Only 2,500 votes prevented Democrats from reclaiming a Cobb-based state Senate seat.
"The challenge for both parties going forward is a question of how do we deal with the changing demographics," said House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, D-Atlanta. "Republicans bet on a majority-white, working-class dynamic, and it paid off in this election."
Her party, meanwhile, competed for suburban women, and “that bet did not pay off,” Abrams said.
Abrams, considered a rising national Democratic star, predicted that Georgia will prove to be a national model for Democrats. Eventually. But only if the national party and its presidential nominees are willing to compete here.
“Georgia is reflective of the only viable path for Democrats, which is an equal, early investment in communities of color as mobilization targets, as well as continuing to offer a place for white voters,” she said. “But we have to find a way to navigate both at the same time.”
Clinton on Tuesday came closer to winning Georgia than she did Ohio despite making only a halfhearted effort here. For Democrats who believed 2016 offered the perfect combination of a weak Republican candidate and shifting demographics, Clinton's decision to compete elsewhere will forever be a source of frustration.
“Georgia stands as a lodestar for how our country and the Democratic Party continue to make progress,” Abrams said. “Georgia Democrats won legislative and local races, solidified gains in formerly red counties like Henry and Douglas and created new coalitions in the GOP strongholds of Gwinnett and Cobb counties. I am proud of our work, and I look forward to a productive 2017 legislative session.”
For Republicans, however, Tuesday showed that all the talk of how increases in minority voters will push Georgia into the Democratic column remains just talk.
“This is a quadrennial dance we do in Georgia where the media says that the demographics in Georgia are changing and it’s becoming more purple and the voters come back and remind them they’re dead wrong,” said McLagan, the GOP operative. “It just never plays out.”
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