It's amazing how as recently as the early 2000s, guys like Max Cleland, Zell Miller, and Roy Barnes strode across Georgia politics like colossi. It must have been multiracial coalitions of whites and blacks that put these men into power. Impossible to imagine today. In many ways, the South has been regressing since the 1990s, similarly to how it regressed during post-Reconstruction in 1873-1908.
Quite remarkable how quickly it all shifted, but it was long overdue, to be fair. Let's take a look at election results and compare them to turnout by race in GA over the cycles in order to see the makeup of the coalition.
% of candidate's voters that were white, 1996:
Clinton 56% (lost)
Cleland 59% (won)
% of candidate's voters that were white, 1998:
Barnes: 59% (won)
Coles: 48% (lost)
% of candidate's voters that were white, 2000:
Gore: 49% (lost)
Miller: 62% (won)
% of candidate's voters that were white, 2002:
Barnes: 54% (lost)
Cleland: 53% (lost)
% of candidate's voters that were white, 2004:
Kerry: 45% (lost)
Majette: 39% (lost)
(the blue/pink line roughly indicates what percentage of Democratic candidate's electorate needed to be white in order to win)
So basically, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the Democratic coalition in Georgia went from 60% white to 45% white. It's now about 35% white and yet pulling roughly the same statewide numbers as when Barnes and Cleland lost in 2002 (which tells you how rapid the demographic shift has been here).
Excellent info, Adam! It really shows that until 2004, literally every Democrat had a within 60-40 racial balance in his coalition. An ideal image of what a post-racist political coalition in a place like the South should look like-- if anything, it would have been even more so if it were blacks jumping to the GOP. I don't understand why people say the breakdown of that system is "long overdue" though-- the re-racialization of party politics seems like a regression. We're back to the days of Jim Crow where the region is dominated by race-based voting blocs, and while blacks are technically enfranchised by the Voting Rights Act, in practice they will never be a part of the winning coalition so long as such blocs are in place. :-/
