Red or Blue? The states deciding the 2024 US presidential election: Georgia

The U.S. election is coming up, with voters in all 50 states deciding who to elect as the next president.

But most states are considered "safe", either solidly Republican or Democratic, and Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have not spent time or money trying to persuade the voters there.

Instead, both candidates are gunning for the main prize — seven "swing" states that will determine the election and the presidency.

Georgia on my mind

Georgia for Singaporeans of a certain age is probably known for peanut farms, because of former president Jimmy Carter.

Carter was a peanut farmer prior to becoming president, but after serving as a naval officer aboard the fledgling nuclear submarine fleet.

Georgia is also known for peaches, and, well, rap music.

Georgia’s capital of Atlanta has produced an astounding number of highly influential rappers, such as the duo OutKast, Killer Mike, Ludacris, and Donald Glover, also known as Childish Gambino.

The Peach State has produced many quintessentially American companies, such as being the birthplace of Coca-Cola. Atlanta was also the home city of the Cable News Network, or CNN, as it is now known.

It also boasts the world‘s busiest airport and the United States’s fourth-largest seaport.

It is also home to a large creative industry, with many film and TV productions being based in the state.

Fun fact, the opening scene of "Captain America: Civil War", ostensibly somewhere in Africa, was actually shot in Georgia.

March to the Sea

Georgia was one of the original Thirteen Colonies of the United States that broke away from Britain and fought in the Revolutionary War.

But its modern political history traces back to the American Civil War in the 1860s, when Georgia rebelled and joined the Confederate States, eventually losing to the Union, but not before its capital of Atlanta was burned to the ground.

However, in the post-war period, its traditional planter class was able to retain much of its previously held political power, with the freed African American slaves becoming only marginally more politically empowered than they were before.

This would eventually lead to the emergence of one of George’s most famous sons, Martin Luther King Jr., who led the modern American Civil Rights movement, the foundations of modern American progressivism.

However, Georgia still remained part of a solid block of Southern states that tended to vote for more conservative candidates, such as the pro-segregation George Wallace in 1968.

Segregation is the political idea that racial communities should be kept separate, which was largely a mask for overt discrimination.

The state solidly voted for the Democratic Party, until the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ensuring that African Americans had the right to vote.

This, along with President Richard Nixon reaching out to the Southern states, caused the polarities of the Democratic and Republican parties to switch, making the Republican party home to U.S. conservatism and Georgia's preferred choice.

However, in the initial years of that switch, Georgia showed that it was not above making exceptions, voting for the progressive, Democratic, and Georgia local Jimmy Carter.

The state voted for Carter twice, in his initial winning campaign in the 1970s, and over Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

It also voted for fellow Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992, although it rejected him in 1996.

The state voted solidly Republican year after year and was considered a safe seat for the party, until 2020 when it voted for Joe Biden.

Find me 11,780 votes

The 2020 election was won by Biden by a razor-thin margin, 0.23 per cent, or 11,779 votes.

Trump, in the months after the election, was recorded trying to coerce the Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes to give him the state.

Trump had made several unfounded accusations that the Democrats had stolen the state, insisting that he had actually won, but ultimately to no avail as Raffensberger refused to accommodate him, even recording Trump’s possibly illegal exhortations to do otherwise.

Perhaps most remarkable of all was that Raffensberger was a Republican himself, and had voted for Trump, and might very well do so again in 2024.

Nonetheless, he stood firm, and for his trouble would face death threats and have Trump-directed opponents try to unseat him in Republican primaries for his position, although he would beat them back handily.

Swing swing

Georgia’s 16 electoral votes, the second largest of the seven swing states, now hinges on an electorate that is very divided amongst itself.

If its politicians are any indication, the electorate runs the gamut, from the ultra-conservative conspiracy theory-loving Marjorie Taylor Green to the moderate Republican Raffensberger, Pro-Trump but unwilling to bend the law for him, to the progressive Stacey Abrams on the other side.

NPR, the US’s public service media outlet, interviewed a handful of Georgian voters, and their opinions ran the gamut as well, such as legal immigrants worried that illegal immigrants would affect their status.

Two women NPR spoke to said they were both extremely worried about women’s health issues, security, and bodily autonomy.

One said she would likely vote on that basis, but one was voting on the basis of physical security, saying that she and her daughters felt unsafe walking to a local shop alone.

NPR clarified that crime statistics in the U.S. were dropping, even if not all U.S. voters believed it.

But underlying much of it were cost of living concerns, concerns that Trump voters put squarely at the feet of the incumbent Joe Biden and his proposed successor Harris.

The state is currently considered too close to call, with traditional Republican voters bumping up against younger, more progressive voters in a state whose demographics is changing.

Previously on...

Georgia's 14 congressional seats returned only five Democrats, and nine Republicans.

However, both its Senators are Democrats, the first seat hard won during the fiery 2020 election, with Raphael Warnock, a preacher, being returned in 2022.

However, in that same 2022 election, the state elected the Republican Brian Kemp, and has elected a Republican governor every year since 2002.

But Georgia is also dealing with a worrying amount of election misinformation, with Raffensperger warning on Oct. 31 that the state was being targeted by false accusations of voter fraud.

Raffensperger, again in charge of the conduct of the election in Georgia, has assured voters that the election is secure, as reported by CNN.

One such piece of misinformation was a purported video of a Haitian immigrant illegally casting several votes, and Raffensperger called the video “obviously fake”, citing concerns that the effort was part of foreign meddling.

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Top image via Donald Trump/Facebook, Kamala Harris/Facebook, & Georgia.gov/Facebook