The entire country will vote on the next president of the United States this fall, but the election will likely come down to seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Given the outsized importance of these states, it’s worth taking a closer look at the data we have in each of them — not just where the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stands today, but also each candidate’s path to victory. and what issues could tip the election. Our fourth state is the Peach State, Georgia, whose narrow swing to the Democratic column in 2020 helped secure President Joe Biden’s victory.

The history

Georgia is a new battleground in the post-2000 “red state, blue state” era. While statewide races had not been particularly contentious until then, it has since become left-leaning compared to the country as a whole. In 2016, Trump won the state by 5 percentage points, which was the state’s largest margin in a presidential race in the past two decades, until Biden won the state by just 0.2 points — becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win there since Bill Clinton in 1992. .

Subsequent elections further confirmed Georgia’s new competitive position. In January 2021, Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock narrowly claimed both state Senate seats in the runoff, marking their party’s first victories for that office in Georgia since 2000. Although Republicans rallied in the 2022 midterm elections to retain all state executive positions — including governor — Warnock managed to win reelection that year against a Trump-backed candidate.

The 2024 polls

Heading into November, Trump really needs to win the 16 electoral votes in Georgia to have a good chance of achieving the magical majority number of 270 nationally. Without knowing how other states will vote, 538’s prediction suggests that Trump would have about a 3 in 4 chance of winning the presidency if he ultimately takes Georgia. But if Harris claims it, she would have a nine-in-ten chance of becoming the next president.

And polls once again show that there is an extremely exciting battle in Georgia. Trump leads by about 1 point in the state’s polling average of 538.* While Trump has a slight lead, his standing against Harris is significantly closer than against Biden, who was about 6 points behind Trump when he stepped aside in late July.

The demographics

In 2020, the nearly 30 counties in the Atlanta metropolitan area made up about 60 percent of Georgia’s votes, making any shifts in that part of the state particularly impactful. Biden’s narrow victory could be attributed to the fact that he gave those counties a combined 15-point lead, nearly doubling Hillary Clinton’s 2016 8-point lead over Trump, while doing only slightly better in the rest of Georgia then did Clinton. Biden’s winning coalition came largely from the state’s sizable base of black voters, but also from gains among white voters with college degrees, especially in and around Atlanta, while Trump relied heavily on voters in more rural or exurban areas parts of the state.

Like Biden, Harris will need overwhelming support — and solid turnout rates — from black voters in Georgia. With nearly a third of the population, the Peach State has the largest population and share of Black Americans of all seven major swing states. In 2020, about 30 percent of Georgia voters identified as black according to exit polls, and about 90 percent supported Biden, about the same as Clinton’s support level in 2016. However, turnout among black voters in Georgia continued to rise in 2016 and 2020. will be slightly lower than the record highs of 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was the Democratic presidential nominee.

Crucially, recent polling suggests Harris may be shying away from Biden’s 2020 level of support among this group: according to an average of cross-tabulation data from the past month**, Harris has attracted just better than 82 percent of black voters in Georgia. Meanwhile, Trump has gained nearly 15 percent, a small gain compared to his roughly 10 percent in 2020. Taken together, these potential shifts would notably boost Trump’s chances of winning the state in 2024.

Trump can again expect to win a significant majority of white voters in Georgia, a lead he will have nationally and very strongly in the South, which has a higher degree of racially polarized voting than any other part of the country. Still, it’s possible he’ll lose some ground here in 2024: In 2020, Trump won about 70 percent of white voters in Georgia, but in the last month of polling he’s captured about 66 percent of them. For her part, Harris brings in about 31 percent, almost identical to Biden’s 30 percent in 2020.

But Georgia saw a significant education divide among white voters last time around: In 2020, about 80 percent of white voters in Georgia without a four-year degree supported Trump (which makes up about 35 percent of the electorate). Trump, on the other hand, had white voters of a college degree, which made up about a quarter of the state’s vote, by a smaller margin of 11 points (55 percent voted for Trump and 44 percent supported Biden).

In Atlanta-area counties like Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb, more than 50 percent of the white population has at least a bachelor’s degree, so to what extent can Harris win Biden’s coalition (or Warnock’s 2020 and 2022 races, for that matter)? mimics among these voters will be critical to Georgia’s outcome. Recent polls using data from college-educated voters show Harris at 53 percent among the group as a whole (including voters of color), slightly lower than Biden’s 57 percent.

Another wild card in the battle for Georgia will be the growing group of Hispanic voters, who made up just under a tenth of the state’s electorate in 2020. Polls over the past month show this group’s preferences are similar to those of four years ago, as Harris leads Trump by about 25 points — the same margin Biden enjoyed. Because Georgia Latinos are slightly more concentrated in Atlanta’s suburbs and suburbs than in the rest of the state — though the rural Hispanic population has also grown — they will be another factor in how the bluest part of the state breaks out on Nov. 5 .

The problems

In terms of the big issues in this election, the vote in Georgia could hinge mainly on economic issues. Based on September polling from Redfield & Wilton/The Telegraph, 41 percent of Georgia voters cited the economy as the most important factor in their vote, the largest share of voters in any swing state to do so. And while abortion remains a major issue, being the second most mentioned top issue in every swing state, it appears to be slightly less noticeable in the Peach State, with 17 percent citing abortion as the most important issue, below the 20 percent or more cutoff seen in the US. most other swing states. After this, immigration came in second place with 8 percent.

On which candidates Georgia voters trust to solve its problems, according to a late-September survey from Beacon Research/Shaw & Co. Research for Fox News found that Georgia voters were relatively split on whether they trusted Harris or Trump more on the economy and making the country safe, with Trump maintaining a slim lead of 3 to 4 points. Trump, however, had a bigger advantage on immigration: With a 56 percent to 41 percent split, significantly more voters trusted Trump to address the issue that has long been central to his platform. Conversely, abortion was the only issue on which Harris had a large lead, as 57 percent thought she would do better in that area, compared to 39 percent who said Trump.

Another local talking point has dominated headlines lately and could have a major impact on when we’ll know the outcome of the election: In September, Trump supporters on the state election board controversially outvoted their colleagues to overturn the proceedings for counting votes in Georgia. less than two months before the elections. Each precinct is now expected to hand count the total number of ballots cast to see if the figure matches the machine count. This may not sound like a big deal, but manual counts are known to be less accurate than machines and much more time consuming. As a result, this change — which is being challenged in court — could significantly delay election night coverage in Georgia.

Voters in Georgia appear aware of the likelihood that this rule would delay the state’s count, but they are not necessarily opposed to it. A YouGov/CBS News poll in late September found that about two-thirds of the state’s registered voters had heard some or a lot about the change in counting rules, and 63 percent thought it would cause delays in counting votes at the polls. election day. . Still, a slim majority (53 percent) believed that counting hands would make results more accurate, while half believed it would reduce the risk of election fraud. It was highly likely that Republicans maintained these positions, consistent with Trump-fueled doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election among the Republican base, despite a lack of evidence of such fraud. Tellingly, 72 percent of Georgia Republicans in the same survey still did not view Biden as the legitimate winner of the 2020 election in their state.

The downballot races

While Georgia is one of the key cogs in the presidential race, the state lacks much notable action in the downballots. None of the state’s U.S. Senate seats are up for election this year, and none of the fourteen U.S. House of Representatives races appear to be particularly competitive. The state also holds elections for the state legislature, although Republicans hold solid majorities in both chambers that are unlikely to change significantly.

Footnotes

*All figures in this article are as of October 14 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern.

**Based on polls of likely and registered voters only (if a poll included results among both populations, we used likely voters). If a poll included both a head-to-head match between Harris and Trump and a third-party version, we used the head-to-head version. Crosstabs between groups defined by pollsters as “Latino” and “Hispanic” are both included in the averages of Latino voters. Finally, if a polling organization (defined as a partnership between a pollster and a sponsor, or a pollster alone if their work was not sponsored by an outside group) had more than one survey within the relevant time frame, only the most recent version was included . . All polls conducted and released between September 15 and October 14 at 10:30 a.m. Eastern are included.