More Democratic voters move to Georgia ahead of upcoming elections

As campaign efforts ramp up in Georgia ahead of a busy election season, candidates will need to court not only native Georgians, but also registered voters who have moved into the state since 2020, with Democrats apparently having an edge over Republicans.

Georgia gained about 13,500 more likely Democratic voters than Republican voters since the last presidential election, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of voter registration data from L2, a political data vendor.

“I’m not surprised that they are disproportionately Democratic,” said Bernard Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University. He said the voters moving into Georgia mirror national trends of people leaving more Democratic-leaning states such as California and New York due to high costs of living.

Fraga said that since these voters were previously registered in another state before coming to Georgia, they are likely to vote in the upcoming election. “That might give Democrats a small advantage,” he said.

In the 2020 election, President Joe Biden won Georgia by just 11,779 votes, a 0.24 percentage point margin of victory. Fraga said that a small change in the mix of voters could swing this year’s election one way or the other, including shifts in voting preferences among existing Georgians.

Over the past three years, about 140,000 registered voters moved to Georgia, according to the analysis. When accounting for Georgia voters who moved away, the state had a net gain of about 30,000 voters. Roughly two out of every three of these new voters are likely Democrats, accounting for about 19,500 voters. About 6,000 of the new voters are likely Republican voters, while the remainder were not registered with a political party in their prior state or belonged to third parties.

While many states allow voters to register by party affiliation, Georgia does not.

For voters not registered with a political party, L2 estimates party affiliation using voter history and demographic data. The data does not track people moving to a new state and voting for the first time or people who could not be matched to their prior registrations. For example, those who did not complete a change-of-address form.

An additional 50,000 registered voters have moved to Georgia leading up to the 2024 election than during the same time period before the 2020 election, and more of the new arrivals appear to lean Democratic than compared with four years ago.

The AJC analysis found that the three states that sent the most voters to Georgia were Florida, California and New York in that order. While voters from Florida are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, those from California and New York are more Democratic.