Unofficial Georgia primary results in 2016:
Republican votes: 1,292,690
Democratic votes: 761,132
Total votes: 2,053,822
Turnout: 43.6 percent
Georgia primary results in 2008:
Republican votes: 963,541
Democratic votes: 1,060,851
Total votes: 2,024,392
Turnout: 45.1%
AJC on the trail
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is closely tracking the presidential campaign across the country, with a special emphasis on the South. To see past campaign stories, go to myAJC.com.
AJC on the trail
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is closely tracking the presidential campaign across the country, with a special emphasis on the South. To see past campaign stories, go to myAJC.com.
A record-high number of Georgia voters fueled the wins of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton, but the fracturing of the state’s delegates shows why the race for the White House is anything but clear-cut.
Trump earned the votes of almost four in 10 GOP voters and the lion’s share of the state’s 76 delegates, but Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz was poised to win more delegates than Florida U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, even though Rubio topped Cruz in the popular vote.
And despite Clinton’s rout of Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in Georgia — she captured more than 70 percent of the Democratic vote — he was set to take about a quarter of the 102 Democratic delegates up for grabs.
The Georgia results were a microcosm of the emerging national picture. While Super Tuesday cemented Trump and Clinton as the most likely candidates to win each party’s nomination, most of their rivals amassed enough support to stay in the race.
Cruz won three more states and Rubio picked up his first victory, giving both new grist to stay in. Another Republican, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, said he would fight on despite going winless Tuesday. And Sanders, who picked up scattered wins in four states, promised to stay in the hunt through the Democratic convention in the summer.
Only retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who trailed badly in most states, signaled that he would quit the race Wednesday. He said in a statement that he wouldn’t participate in Thursday’s Republican debate and that he sees no path to victory.
It came after a frenzied surge of campaigning that now moves into a new phase after Tuesday’s sweep of nationwide votes. The heightened attention in Georgia — all seven presidential candidates visited the Peach State in the two weeks ahead of the vote — helped drive the vote total here to record highs.
More than 2 million Georgians cast ballots in Tuesday’s primaries, narrowly topping the 2008 record fueled by Barack Obama’s historic candidacy. In that contest, about 50,000 more Democrats cast ballots than Republicans. In this one, though, Republicans far outnumbered their counterparts: Roughly 1.3 million GOP votes were cast, compared with about 760,000 Democratic ballots.
Trump and Clinton both won the state by dominating the party’s core constituencies.
The billionaire won all but four of the state’s 159 counties — Clarke, Cobb, DeKalb and Fulton — racking up big margins in Atlanta’s exurbs. He bested Cruz in every county, and he kept Rubio’s margins in the four counties he won relatively slim. Exit polls showed Trump’s appeal cut across all demographics, regardless of age, education level, gender, religious beliefs, and degree of conservatism. And his victories Tuesday in states stretching from the South to New England gave his candidacy a new aura of inevitability.
"To all my Republican friends out there, and Democratic friends for that matter: Donald Trump is going to be the nominee," Kennesaw State University political scientist Kerwin Swint said. "Get used to it. Accept it. Prepare for it."
Cruz beat out Rubio in Georgia’s record-setting early-voting period, but exit polls show Rubio won over many late-breaking voters. Cruz also trailed Trump in support from Republican voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christian — the type of voter who makes up the overwhelming majority of Georgia’s GOP electorate. That base was supposed to be a bulwark of support for his candidacy, but many were siphoned off Tuesday by Trump and Rubio.
“He was supposed to have that Southern firewall,” Rubio said. “That didn’t happen.”
Maybe it didn’t happen, but Cruz did win more Georgia delegates than Rubio. The formula Georgia follows for allocating delegates relies heavily on outcomes in individual congressional districts. Cruz came in second in more congressional districts than Rubio, whose votes were bunched primarily in the 5th and 6th congressional districts.
The race also proved anew that endorsements carry little weight with Georgia voters. Rubio and Cruz both netted the biggest haul of support among political figures in Georgia, while Trump boasted just a handful of current and former legislators. Heavyweights such as Gov. Nathan Deal and U.S. Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue steered clear.
Clinton’s win over Sanders on the Democratic side was even more convincing.
She dominated Sanders in the race for black voters, who made up about half the Georgia party’s electorate. Eight in 10 black voters backed Clinton, and she kept it close among white men in Georgia. Sanders now faces a daunting delegate deficit — and even bigger tests in the industrial Midwest states of Michigan and Ohio that vote in the next weeks.
She won every county but one — rural Echols County, where Sanders edged her by four votes. One of her biggest margins was in vote-rich DeKalb County, a Democratic stronghold where she beat Sanders by more than 40 percentage points.
The race now shifts to a sweep of caucuses and primaries on Saturday and Sunday in Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine and Nebraska. Next up are bigger, delegate-rich prizes in Michigan on March 8 and the crucial March 15 primaries in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio that could determine the race — or send it hurtling into a summerlong fight.
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