First, black voters have increased their power significantly over the last two decades in Georgia. In November 2000, the Georgia secretary of state reported that black voters made up 25% of all registered voters for whom race and ethnicity was known. Currently, black voters are 33% of all voters for whom race and ethnicity is known. According to the Census Bureau, no state in the nation has seen a larger increase from 2000 to 2018 in the share blacks make up of the citizen voting age population than Georgia. Blacks, of course, are the most Democratic ethnic or racial bloc in the entire electorate.
Second, a lot of the white voters in Georgia have a college degree. This is a group moving to the left nationally. Georgia is in the top half in the nation for the percentage that whites with a college degree make up of both eligible white voters and likely 2020 white voters, according to the Census Bureau and a projection by The New York Times’ Nate Cohn using government data. That’s unlike every other deep southern state and every state that flipped from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016.
Moreover, there’s a lot of room for Democrats to grow among college whites in Georgia. In the 2018 governor’s race for example, Stacey Abrams lost college educated whites by around 20 points — but Democrats actually won them in the nationwide House vote.
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