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. :-/
Well I obviously don't mean "overdue" in the sense that it's a good thing. I mean more from the perspective of the realignment of the national brands, and later, the state brand. Statewide Democrats and those elected to the Senate in particular were governing as liberals throughout the entirety of the 1990s (though maybe not as liberal as counterparts in other regions, liberal nonetheless for Georgia). By the time we got to Barnes - who arguably knocked five years off Georgia Democrats' dominance by himself - it was a relatively modern, national Democratic state government. That combined with the consistent losses in identification with the national brand finally pushed it over. I'm just amazed that it didn't happen
before the General Assembly, Governor, Senators et al really began shifting leftward. Even old coots like Zell seem to forget how he zigged
and zagged, finding his way to the left in a 1990s Georgia more often than he takes credit for today.