Georgia

Georgia, once a Democratic bastion like the rest of the South, went heavily for Republicans in the 1990s and much of the 2000s, in both federal and state races. But in 2020, Democrats surged not only to a victory in the presidential race but also in two Senate runoffs, followed by a 2022 election in which Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock won another runoff for a full term. Meanwhile, Republicans not aligned with former President Donald Trump also fared well in 2022, notably Gov. Brian Kemp, who was reelected by a healthy seven-point margin. Suburban voters, a slice of whom supported both Warnock and Kemp, have helped turn Georgia into a highly competitive state. Georgia was the last of the 13 colonies to be founded, by British soldier and politician James Oglethorpe in 1733 as an “asylum of the unfortunate,” reserved for debtors and other outcasts from England. Oglethorpe, a humanitarian, forbade slavery, but the settlers rebelled and repealed his ban in 1750. In 1790, the first census showed Georgia—the biggest state by area—with the smallest population of any of the original 13 states except tiny Delaware and Rhode Island. It was only the fifth largest slave state when the Civil War began. Early in the 20th century, Georgia was still largely agrarian and sparsely populated. Then, beginning in the 1960s, the state shared in the growth explosion taking place in the South. By 2000, it was ranked among the top 10 most populous states, and it’s now the eighth largest. This is the result mainly of the stunning growth in metro Atlanta, which spreads out over the red clay hills, growing from 3.1 million people in 1990 to 4.2 million in 2000 and just over 6 million today. The Atlanta Regional Commission projects that by 2050, greater Atlanta will see its population rise to 8.6 million. Georgia’s median income is about $3,000 below the national average, but it exceeds that of its regional neighbors save Virginia and Texas. Even before its demographic surge, Atlanta was in many ways the center of the South. Prior to the Civil War, the city, located near the south end of the Appalachian chain, was a railroad junction. Its capture by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in September 1864 and his...