Yet there is a bipartisan consensus that the state is not exactly what it was, even just a few years ago. Its population surged from 7.9 million to 10.6 million people from 2000 to 2019, and its foreign-born population now exceeds 10 percent. While Republicans remain formidable in rural areas, an accurate portrait of 21st Century Georgia would have to include not only peach and peanut farms, but also Your DeKalb Farmers Market, a global culinary bazaar in the Atlanta suburbs staffed by workers from 40 countries that attracts both immigrants and native-born bourgeois bohemians…

Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, puts his state in a category with Virginia, North and South Carolina, Florida and Texas that he calls the “Growth South,” as opposed to the “Stagnant South,” represented by states like Mississippi and Arkansas. He argues that this may be a better way to think about the changing region, and the Democrats’ growing strength in parts of it, than the old dichotomy between “Deep South” and “Rim South” states.

Growth South states, he said, “are attracting a racially and ethnically diverse population. So more Hispanics are moving into them, as well as a variety of Asians — Koreans, Indians, Chinese. These groups are all more Democratic than not.”