Behind the collapse of the Republican coalition in Georgia

Ten days before the election, President Donald Trump returned to Houston County — the Middle Georgia stronghold he carried by double digits in 2024 — to rally Republicans for a triumphant last push.

The setting was fitting. The county is the home base of Sonny Perdue, whose 2002 upset of Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes helped launch nearly a quarter-century of GOP dominance in Georgia.

Then came Tuesday’s election. Houston County went blue. Across Georgia, the Republican coalition came apart.

Republicans didn’t just lose Georgia’s marquee races. They lost every statewide contest on the ballot, a sweeping wipeout that upended the state’s political landscape.

The rout fractured a coalition that kept Republicans in power for a generation. From Atlanta’s outer suburbs to rural strongholds, the GOP lost ground in places where it once won commanding margins.

And the defeat wasn’t simply about soaring Democratic turnout, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis found.

Even as overall turnout increased from the 2022 midterm, Republican candidates drew fewer votes. Black participation soared while white turnout declined. Independent voters broke decisively toward Democrats, who also made significant gains among white voters.

The results raise a fundamental question for a Georgia Republican Party long accustomed to calling the shots: Was the GOP’s collapse a temporary backlash against Trump or the start of a more lasting political realignment?

New battlegrounds

Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 helped redraw Georgia’s political map. Republicans ran up their margins in rural counties even as Atlanta’s once-conservative suburbs began abandoning the GOP.

A decade later, the map is shifting again.

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff improved on Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ 2024 performance in all 159 counties, including areas where Republicans still won comfortably.

The most dramatic shift came in Whitfield County, a northwest Georgia Republican stronghold that Trump carried by 44 points in 2024 — but that U.S. Rep. Mike Collins won by only 13 points, a staggering 31-point swing.

Ossoff flipped a dozen counties that backed Trump two years earlier, including Lowndes County in South Georgia, where the Democrat won the endorsement of Valdosta’s GOP mayor.

The gains stretched into territory Democrats have struggled to crack for years — and may not again anytime soon. Trump carried Spalding County by roughly 17 points in 2024. Ossoff won it by 3 points Tuesday.

Bottoms tallied nearly 200,000 fewer votes than Ossoff but still defeated Jackson by nearly 9 percentage points. And she, too, captured territory where Republicans long held the upper hand.

Bottoms and Ossoff both won Fayette County, an affluent suburb south of Atlanta that Democrats have long wanted to turn into a battleground.

And they threatened to flip Paulding County northwest of Atlanta, which Trump carried with nearly 62% of the vote in 2024.

Trump’s shadow

At one stop after another, Trump told supporters to “pretend” he was on the ballot. Voters appeared to take him at his word.

About six in 10 Georgia Senate voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance, according to ABC News Voter Polls. Roughly nine in 10 of those voters backed Ossoff.

The economy was another source of dissatisfaction. About three-quarters of Georgia Senate voters rated the nation’s economy negatively, and Ossoff overwhelmingly carried those who described it as poor.

A shrinking GOP vote

Here’s another way to measure the scale of the Republican defeat: Even as more Georgians voted, GOP candidates received fewer votes than they did four years ago.

Roughly 225,000 more votes were cast for governor than in the 2022 midterm. Yet Rick Jackson received about 200,000 fewer votes than Brian Kemp did four years earlier.

State School Superintendent Richard Woods, who comfortably won his three previous elections, got about 226,000 fewer votes than in 2022. Insurance Commissioner John King’s vote total dropped by roughly 207,000, while Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper drew about 148,000 fewer votes.

The Democratic-heavy five core metro Atlanta counties had a 10% increase in total votes cast in the governor’s race. Everywhere else in the state, the total vote growth was only 4%.

Across 130 smaller Georgia counties, Trump’s combined advantage of roughly 610,000 votes in 2024 shrank to about 363,000 for Jackson.

That’s a net Democratic improvement of nearly 250,000 votes across a vast Republican-friendly stretch of Georgia.

So this wasn’t just a Democratic surge. It was a Republican retreat.

A changing electorate

For years, Georgia Democrats argued that the state’s growing diversity would eventually reshape its politics. On Tuesday, they got a glimpse of what that could look like.

White voters accounted for just 54% of Georgia’s electorate, down from nearly 60% in the 2022 midterm and 61% when Trump first carried Georgia in 2016. Black voters, meanwhile, made up 30% of the electorate, up from about 26% four years ago.

And it wasn’t just a matter of more voters showing up.

“Georgia had a historic surge in midterm turnout, driven by record voting levels among Black, Latino, and Asian American Georgians that cannot be explained by demographic change alone,” said Bernard Fraga, an Emory University political scientist.

Roughly nine in 10 Black men supported Bottoms, according to The AP Voter Poll. That’s a substantial jump from the roughly three-quarters who backed Kamala Harris in her 2024 loss to Trump.

Women also shifted sharply toward Democrats.

Four years ago, Kemp carried women by 5 points over Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent. This time, Bottoms won them by roughly 10 points.

Latino voters also moved toward Democrats. About six in 10 backed Bottoms, roughly 10 points more than supported Abrams in 2022, according to ABC News Voter Polls.

Black women remained just as firmly in the Democratic camp. About nine in 10 supported Bottoms, roughly the same share that voted for Harris two years earlier.

Changing voter rolls

Between 2022 and 2026, the number of registered Black voters grew by more than 235,000, a 10% increase. White registration rose by about 81,000, or 2%.

Black women had an even sharper spike. Their registration grew by more than 125,000, while the number who voted climbed by roughly 150,000 since 2022.

And the precinct-level results showed how much those communities mattered to Bottoms’ victory. In about 510 precincts where Black women made up at least 40% of voters, Bottoms received nearly 583,000 votes to Jackson’s roughly 60,000.

White voters and independents shift

Independent voters have often given the GOP a decisive edge in statewide contests. This year, they went the other way.

About two-thirds of independent voters supported Ossoff over Collins, according to ABC News Voter Polls, and Bottoms carried the group by roughly 10 percentage points.

Democrats made significant gains among white voters, too.

Ossoff won 39% of white voters, compared with the 29% who backed fellow Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in his 2022 victory, according to the ABC survey.

That blew past the white-voter benchmark in Georgia Democrats’ long-standing “30-30 rule.” The political rule of thumb holds that Democrats can win statewide by capturing at least 30% of white voters while Black voters make up roughly 30% of the electorate.