This is the first in what will be a recurring series in the final month of the 2020 election cycle—a granular look at where the battlegrounds will be decided. We’ll focus on the counties to watch on Election Night 2020, and we begin our exploration in Georgia, a state that is not only a tossup at the presidential level, but has two (!) key U.S. Senate races: Republican Sen. David Perdue is facing a tough reelection challenge from Democrat Jon Ossoff, but there’s also a multicandidate special election (almost certainly leading to a runoff) featuring appointed incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler, Republican Rep. Doug Collins, and Democrat Raphael Warnock, among others.
The purpose of this exercise is simple. It is often true (and perhaps moreso in Georgia than anywhere else) that following just the statewide numbers can lead to false conclusions. In 2018, for example, nearly two hours after the polls had closed in Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp still had an outsized lead (north of 25 points) over Democrat Stacey Abrams in the state’s gubernatorial election. The final result, as we know, was considerably different, with Kemp winning by just one point.
And let’s be clear: Winning a state is about more than just winning the “swing” counties. Sure, we will discuss those in depth as well, but winning is also about minimizing the damage in counties where Democrats traditionally tank, and maximizing the damage where Democrats traditionally do well. So our examination will be in three parts: swing counties, “containment” counties (traditionally Republican), and “expansion” counties (traditionally Democratic).
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a state that may signal the Democratic ascendancy in the South: Georgia. Anyone with a pulse and a passing interest in politics already knows that the state of Georgia had an utterly monstrous first day of early voting, with some voters waiting as many as 11 hours to cast their ballots. The massive turnout, coupled with polling data showing the state close, tells us it will be a state to watch on Election Night.
What follows, we hope, will tell us where to look to see if the blue wave has actually reached all the way to Georgia.
SWING COUNTIES: COBB, GWINNETT, AND HENRY
For the uninitiated, Cobb County is a large suburban county to the west of the city of Atlanta, casting roughly 327,000 votes in 2016. Gwinnett is a large suburban county to the northeast of the city of Atlanta, casting an almost identical vote total (325,000). Henry County, to the southeast of Atlanta proper, is the smallest of the three but still substantial in size, tallying over 98,000 votes in 2016.
These three suburban counties in the Atlanta metro area have two vital things in common: 1) Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama in all three counties and 2) Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Donald Trump in all three as well. What’s more, if you look at the results from 2018 (taking an average across all eight statewide races), Democrats did even better than they did against Trump in 2016!
| County name |
2012 d vs. r margin |
2016 d vs. r margin |
2018 d vs. r margin |
| Cobb |
R + 12.5% |
D + 2.1% |
D + 6.3% |
| Gwinnett |
R + 9.2% |
D + 5.8% |
D + 11.7% |
| HENRY |
R + 3.3% |
D + 4.4% |
D + 13.9% |
The trajectory here is unmistakeable. That is why although these are considered “swing counties,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that for Democrats to win, the blue team merely needs to lead in these counties. Let’s be clear: It will be a bad night for Democrats in Georgia if Trump or the GOP Senate hopefuls have a lead in any of these three counties.
So what kind of margin would put Democrats on a glide path to victory here? I’d say given that Democratic candidates lost in the state by an average of three points in 2018, and you’d want additional cushion and protection from a continued erosion in reddening rural counties, a safe metric here would be “10/15/20.” Which is shorthand for the assumption that a Democrat winning Georgia in 2020 would probably want to win Cobb by at least 10 points, Gwinnett by at least 15 points, and Henry by at least 20 points.
But this movement is extremely good news for the future fortunes of the Democrats in the Peach State. Consider that in 2016, these three counties combined for over 750,000 votes. And given that the dozens of rural counties that have been reddening over the past two decades are almost cashed out (the Democrats got less than 15% of the vote, on average, in 13 different counties), seeing this kind of growth in high-growth, high-population counties is heartening.
“CONTAINMENT” COUNTIES: CHEROKEE, COLUMBIA, AND FORSYTH
Cherokee and Forsyth counties are rapidly growing counties in the north end of the Atlanta metro area, logging sizable voter turnouts in 2016 (110,000 for Cherokee and 97,000 for Forsyth). Columbia, unlike the other counties in our study thus far, is not in the Atlanta metro. It is a rapidly growing suburban county adjacent to Augusta, which logged in over 64,000 votes four years ago.
Let there be no illusions about this: Joe Biden is going to get thumped in these three counties. Hard.
But margins matter! And the common thread between these counties is that as they’ve grown immensely over the past decade or so, they’ve also become a bit less red. Nowhere near swing counties, mind you, but less intractably Republican than they were in their fairly recent past. Consider the movement in these red counties:
| County name |
2012 d vs. r margin |
2016 d vs. r margin |
2018 d vs. r margin |
| cherokee |
R + 57.5% |
R + 49.1% |
R + 47.0% |
| columbia |
R + 42.8% |
R + 37.1% |
R + 34.7% |
| forsyth |
R + 62.7% |
R + 46.9% |
R + 44.7% |
Unlike the swing counties listed above, the movement that was pronounced between 2012 and 2016 continued in 2018, but, alas, not at the same pace. But remember: margins matter. Let’s examine how even marginal shifts in large red counties can work in the favor of the Democrats here.
Let’s assume that both Cherokee and Forsyth counties still go to Trump by 40 points, and Columbia County drops to a 30-point margin. That still seems like a landslide margin, and it is. But it also represents a marginal gain of over 20,000 votes for Biden. In a state where Brian Kemp’s margin in the 2018 gubernatorial election was just under 55,000 votes, that’s nearly half of the margin in three counties, and all with a shift that is roughly what the 2012 versus 2016 shift represented.
“EXPANSION” COUNTIES: CLAYTON, DEKALB, AND FULTON
As has been the case for all but one of our counties in this analysis, all three of these counties are in the Atlanta metro area, and two of them are the counties wherein the city limits of Atlanta are found. Most of Atlanta, of course, is in Fulton County, which by itself (out of over 150 counties in the state) accounts for over 10% of the turnout in a typical election (in 2016, 430,000 votes were cast in Fulton County). To its immediate east, DeKalb county is only a tad smaller, registering 312,000 votes in 2016. The smallest of the three by far is Clayton County, which lies just to the south of Fulton and DeKalb counties. It cast 92,000 votes in 2016.
In the “expansion counties,” the goal is running up the score. All three counties have a substantial African American voter base, with DeKalb and Clayton having majority African American populations. In fact, the voter base here leans so heavily Democratic that improving on past margins of victory is actually quite problematic for the blue team:
| County name |
2012 d vs. r margin |
2016 d vs. r margin |
2018 d vs. r margin |
| CLAYTON |
D + 70.0% |
D + 70.1% |
D + 74.0% |
| DEKALB |
D + 56.7% |
D + 62.9% |
D + 63.7% |
| FULTON |
D + 29.7% |
D + 40.8% |
D + 40.7% |
In Clayton and DeKalb, where they lack swingier pockets of predominantly Anglo suburbs that keep the potential Democratic margin down, it’s hard to do better than Democrats have already historically done. So the challenge in these counties is turnout. One common thread between Clayton and DeKalb in particular is that both counties saw disappointing shifts in voter turnout between 2012 and 2016, with DeKalb only increasing turnout by about 1.8%, and Clayton actually shedding about 4,000 votes from 2012. And unlike a lot of counties that saw voter turnout slide between 2012 and 2016, Clayton County is not losing population—it is estimated to have picked up about 33,000 more residents over the course of the decade. So a drop in voter turnout in one county coupled with an anemic turnout growth in the other (the statewide average was just under 5%) is definitely cause for alarm.
But there is also cause for hope. Both of them had comparably stout turnout numbers in 2018. Indeed, DeKalb actually saw a higher turnout in the midterm (roughly 313,500 voters) than in the presidential (roughly 312,500 voters), which is definitely cause for hope. Clayton, as well, saw its turnout come in at over 99% of 2016 turnout numbers. The statewide average was a robust 96.5% of presidential turnout (the gubernatorial race was a hot ticket), and both these counties exceeded that.
For Fulton County, it is a dual challenge: a goal to increase turnout coupled with persuasion in suburban parts of Fulton that once were largely Republican. The northern part of the county is still quite swingy; it is the territory that is part of Lucy McBath’s 6th Congressional district. This part of the county has, until recently, kept the overall Democratic edge in Fulton out of the stratosphere (John Kerry only won the county 59-40 in 2004). But those voters are turning, and if the Democrats can continue that shift—and boost turnout in the heavily African American southern end of the county—it could easily be the margin of victory.
