This seems to mean that Democrats NEED Georgia and North Carolina to vote FOR their guy come 2028….
When Bill Clinton won the state of Georgia in 1992, he didn’t really need it. Even without the Peach State, Clinton would have walked away with 357 electoral votes — a blowout by modern standards. He lost the state in 1996, but again, it didn’t really matter.
Jump forward about three decades, however, and Georgia has turned from a luxury for Democrats to a necessity. True, Georgia’s governor has been a Republican since 2002. But Democrats have had plenty of wins too. In 2020, the U.S. Senate seats won by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock handed Democrats the slimmest of Senate majorities: 50 seats plus Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. Two years later, Warnock’s even bigger win in 2022 — thanks in part to the trainwreck that was Herschel Walker — helped them keep it.
Georgia is also moving closer to the tipping point: the state that puts a presidential candidate over 270 electoral votes. Between 1984 and 2012, Georgia voted 10.3 points to the right of the tipping-point state, on average. But between 2016 and 2024, that difference dropped to R +1.8. Joe Biden won the state by 0.2 points in 2020, similar to his 0.9-point win in what were technically the tipping-point states: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And although Harris lost Georgia, it actually moved even closer to the tipping point. (Harris lost it by 2.2 points, compared to 1.7 in the tipping point of Pennsylvania.)
But while the dream of turning Georgia blue has come true for Democrats — at least sometimes — it hasn’t really been part of a broader shift in the Sun Belt. Instead, the previously purple state of Florida has moved further out of Democrats’ grasp, Texas has been at best a tease for Democrats — Trump won it by nearly 14 points in 2024 — and Arizona moved further away from the tippiing point last year, even as Georgia moved closer…….
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But if all of that sounds like good news for the blue team, the bad news for the party is that the trends are so favorable for them in Georgia that it’s now pretty much a must-win state for Democrats. If they can’t win places like the Peach State, they probably don’t have a majority coalition, period.
For one more presidential cycle — this won’t be true following redistricting in 2032 — Democrats can still technically win the Electoral College through the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But as we’ve written about, counting on exactly 270 electoral votes is a dangerous game. If the Blue Wall is Plan 1A, then Georgia, perhaps along with North Carolina, is Plan 1B…..