Georgia

[Hillary pays minimum wage]

1992 +5
1996 +11?
2000 +13
2004 +14
2008 +12
2012 +11

Is too big of a deal being made out of GA as a battleground state.  When was it ever that red?

[Hillary pays minimum wage]

The premise in GA is that the Republicans have now run out of conservative whites to flip while the black vote, Latino vote and share of non-culturally Southern white moderates is growing.  You're right that even during the 1996-2004 GA wasn't that impressively R.  It just looks a lot like VA circa 2000 right now, depending on how fast Atlanta grows.  For the past decade, the rural D collapse has been roughly compensating for urban D gains.

I'd expect an 8 point victory therefor the GOP with all things being equal.  However if Sandwrs runs it may go 59-41 and won't tell the whole story.  Again like NC it has the demographic issue on ithand but compared to most states seems to still be in the GOP column.  For a state to trend from one side to the other it takes more than a few points and thecstore must have actually been significant at one time.

[hopper]

The premise in GA is that the Republicans have now run out of conservative whites to flip while the black vote, Latino vote and share of non-culturally Southern white moderates is growing.  You're right that even during the 1996-2004 GA wasn't that impressively R.  It just looks a lot like VA circa 2000 right now, depending on how fast Atlanta grows.  For the past decade, the rural D collapse has been roughly compensating for urban D gains.

"The Black Population" has actually shrunk as a percentage of the cities population. You must be talking about "The Atlanta Suburbs"

[Adam Griffin]

Skill and Chance pretty much already summarized it. White voters in Georgia are not going to become any more Republican than they already are - at least, not outside of current exit polling margins of error - whereas non-whites continue to become a much larger share of the population and of the voting bloc. When you factor in that Georgia hasn't had any comprehensive voter mobilization campaign by a presidential candidate since 1996 and you look at how Georgia is 47th in percentage of registered voters and 31st in voter turnout, then you can see that there is a lot of potential in improving Democratic performance in the next decade.

Now for my obligatory voter turnout chart:

As weird as it may (or may not) sound, Georgia exit polling showed a very small difference between the youngest and oldest groups and their support for Obama in 2008. However, for other Democrats, that gap widens quite a bit. In the non-Obama examples, those under the age of 45 are reliably-Democratic, while those over the age of 65 are even more reliably Republican. Some quick and dirty math I did suggests that even whites under the age of 45 in Georgia are close to 40% Democratic.



The next ten years will see a cohort of whites that are >80% Republican be replaced by a cohort of whites that are only 60% Republican; a cohort of voters that are 60% Republican be replaced by a cohort of voters that are 55% Democratic.

That may seem when calculated to be whittling around the margins, but consider this: Georgia whites were 23% Democratic in 2004 and 2008, and 20% in 2012 (I don't think 20% is the new norm, considering Carter/Nunn both got 23% in 2014). In 2016, 28% of whites voting Democratic flips the state; in 2020, 27%; in 2024, 26%; and so forth. Factoring in what we mentioned above + new movement to the state in the coming years, and you realize that it really ain't gonna take a lot to get us there.