Georgia has gone from luxury to necessity for Democrats

Luckily for them, Jon Ossoff has an edge.

Atlanta Magazine

This is the first column in a new series about the most competitive and/or interesting 2026 midterm races. We’ll publish these posts periodically throughout the summer.

Some might say it’s a bit early to cover the midterms. And to be fair, we're 468 days away from them. However, the midterm landscape already forms the background context for almost everything you see in politics, from Trump’s (currently declining) popularity to how the parties are strategizing for the future. Our plan is to combine data-driven analysis and conversations with local experts to see how well the conventional wisdom about these races holds up.

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When Bill Clinton won the state of Georgia in 1992, he didn’t really need it. Even without the Peach State, Clinton would have walked away with 357 electoral votes — a blowout by modern standards. He lost the state in 1996, but again, it didn’t really matter.

Jump forward about three decades, however, and Georgia has turned from a luxury for Democrats to a necessity. True, Georgia’s governor has been a Republican since 2002. But Democrats have had plenty of wins too. In 2020, the U.S. Senate seats won by Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock handed Democrats the slimmest of Senate majorities: 50 seats plus Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. Two years later, Warnock’s even bigger win in 2022 — thanks in part to the trainwreck that was Herschel Walker — helped them keep it.

Georgia is also moving closer to the tipping point: the state that puts a presidential candidate over 270 electoral votes. Between 1984 and 2012, Georgia voted 10.3 points to the right of the tipping-point state, on average. But between 2016 and 2024, that difference dropped to R +1.8. Joe Biden won the state by 0.2 points in 2020, similar to his 0.9-point win in what were technically the tipping-point states: Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And although Harris lost Georgia, it actually moved even closer to the tipping point. (Harris lost it by 2.2 points, compared to 1.7 in the tipping point of Pennsylvania.)

But while the dream of turning Georgia blue has come true for Democrats — at least sometimes — it hasn’t really been part of a broader shift in the Sun Belt. Instead, the previously purple state of Florida has moved further out of Democrats’ grasp, Texas has been at best a tease for Democrats — Trump won it by nearly 14 points in 2024 — and Arizona moved further away from the tipping point last year, even as Georgia moved closer.

So why has Georgia trended left compared to the country overall? That’s mostly down to the Atlanta metropolitan area — which I’m defining as the 11 counties that make up the Atlanta Regional Commission.¹ That area — which accounted for about 47 percent of Georgia voters in the 2024 presidential election — is increasingly blue. Joe Biden did better than Hillary Clinton in the Atlanta metro region, and Kamala Harris further improved on Biden’s margins there in 2024, one of the few places anywhere in the country where she did so.²

What’s so special about Metro Atlanta? It’s relatively young, with a median age of 37.6, and increasingly wealthy and college-educated — 43 percent of adults there have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to the U.S. average of 36 percent. And one-third of its population is Black, but only 12 percent is Hispanic. (Democrats had some problems with the former group in 2024, but far more with the latter.) In 2023, 12.3 percent of its population was new to the area within the past year, which isn’t particularly high³. But in contrast to nearly every other state in the South, modeled partisanship data from the state suggests that new residents are substantially left-leaning (D +12). In short, it’s a state where young professionals go when they want Southern amenities but multicultural vibes. Combined with the general shift of the suburbs toward Democrats — less than one-tenth of the population lives in the city proper — that’s about as favorable a set of circumstances as you’ll find for Democrats based on recent trends.

Democrats can’t afford to lose Georgia

But if all of that sounds like good news for the blue team, the bad news for the party is that the trends are so favorable for them in Georgia that it’s now pretty much a must-win state for Democrats. If they can’t win places like the Peach State, they probably don’t have a majority coalition, period.

For one more presidential cycle — this won’t be true following redistricting in 2032 — Democrats can still technically win the Electoral College through the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But as we’ve written about, counting on exactly 270 electoral votes is a dangerous game. If the Blue Wall is Plan 1A, then Georgia, perhaps along with North Carolina, is Plan 1B.

And in the Senate, it’s even more indispensable. In fact, for Democrats to have any hope of achieving a “trifecta” in 2029, holding onto Ossoff’s seat — and Warnock’s in 2028 — is little short of a necessity.

Why? Well, as you (hopefully) know, each state gets exactly two senators, which means that the Dakotas — combined population of 1.7 million — have four senators between them, but California’s nearly 40 million residents have just two. Georgia was the 23rd-bluest state in 2024. So this skew toward rural states means that even if Democrats controlled both Senate seats in Georgia and every state bluer than it, they’d have just 46 senators, still well short of a majority.

Next year is one of those times when the rural skew shows up most clearly on the map. To understate things, the 2026 Senate map is not exactly ideal for the Democratic Party. Of the 22 Republican-held seats up for election, 20 are in states that Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024. So breaking Republicans’ 53-seat majority next year will require Democrats to compete (and win) in unfriendly territory like Ohio and Iowa — as well as holding onto all of their current seats, including and especially Ossoff’s. (This is within the realm of possibility, but probably not something you’d bet on.) Even if Democrats are looking two cycles ahead toward 2028, they’ll need to hold their Georgia seats while picking up Republican-held ones in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Georgia isn’t a toss-up (in 2026)

If Democrats have gone about 50/50 in recent Georgia elections, does that mean the Senate race is a pure toss-up next year? Well, probably not. Historically, we’d expect Democrats to do well in 2026 as the party out of the White House. Whether we end up with a blue wave or blue ripple will come down to how (un)popular Trump is next year and how the economy is doing. But the increasingly diverse and working-class Republican coalition is also increasingly full of low-propensity voters who might sit out a midterm.

And Ossoff might also be a stronger-than-average candidate. Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia professor who studies the state’s elections, told me that if the election were held today “I think Ossoff would have the inside track.” That’s partially because incumbents in Georgia (literally) “have an ‘I’ beside their name” on the ballot that gives them an edge. But it also comes down to Ossoff himself.

“Even Republicans are not seeing [Ossoff]… as some joke. They might hate his policies and jab at his age or whatever, but they don't see him as some pushover because of what he's done in the past,” said Greg Bluestein, the chief political reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Ossoff had $15 million on hand at the end of June. And back in March, he broke the record for the most money raised by an incumbent in the first quarter of an off year. According to Split Ticket, Ossoff’s Wins Above Replacement (WAR) — a metric that quantifies candidate quality — was D+6.4 in 2020. That means his margin in that race was 6.4 points better than would be expected based on the “fundamentals.” Although Nate and Galen Druke might have neglected Ossoff in their Democratic primary “draft”, other smart observers even regard him as a leading potential presidential nominee.

And Ossoff will likely be competing in a favorable political environment. Donald Trump’s approval rating is already underwater in Georgia, according to most polls. Based on historical trends, we’d expect it to fall even lower over the next year and a half.

The Republican primary could make or break the party’s chances

The elephant in the room here is that there’s no elephant in the room: we don’t know who will run against Ossoff. Georgia’s Republican primary is scheduled for May 19th, 2026 and there’s no clear frontrunner at the moment. Because the state is so competitive, candidate quality will matter for Republicans. “I think if there is a really strong Republican nominee, they've got a chance. And I think if it's a mediocre to not good candidate, then Ossoff has an edge.” said Republican strategist Brian Robinson.

The party lost its best potential candidate when term-limited Governor Brian Kemp declined to run. Kemp would have moved the race into toss-up territory even in a blue wave year. He has a stellar approval rating and won his last reelection by 7.5 points. That was in 2022, the same year Raphael Warnock won reelection by 2.8 points. He’s also the only Republican candidate who consistently ran ahead of Ossoff in early general election polls. But according to Bullock, Kemp saw “as many governors have, that becoming a senator is far less rewarding.”

But it’s not all bad news for the Georgia GOP. They avoided a potential disaster when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene declined to run. Greene had a legitimate shot at winning the Republican primary. In an April Trafalgar Group poll, she led the primary field with 43 percent of the vote. But if she became the Republican nominee, Ossoff could’ve thrown his victory party in May. Greene ran far behind other lesser-known candidates in general election polls against Ossoff. Before Greene’s announcement, Ossoff even tried to bait her into running, saying “I don’t think that she’s got the guts to do it.” When your opponent wants you in the race that badly, it might be a signal that you aren’t exactly the ideal nominee.

So where does that leave the primary field? Only three candidates have officially declared: U.S. House member Buddy Carter, Georgia Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner John King, and horse trainer Reagan Box. Carter represents a district on Georgia’s coast that includes Savannah. Bullock said that “while [Carter] is very well known down at what they call the Coastal Empire, people in Atlanta don’t know who he is. So he's going to spend a fair amount of money simply introducing himself to the Atlanta area, because that's where the great bulk of the votes come from.” King has won one statewide election in 2022, but Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner isn’t exactly a high-profile job.

It’s a smaller field than might have been expected, especially given the competitiveness of the state. According to Bluestein, there was “a concern among GOP senior leaders that after Kemp said he wasn't going to run, there'd be 15 people in the race within minutes.” That didn’t happen. But the race won’t stay this small. Mike Collins, a U.S. House member who represents a district in the Atlanta area, is considering a run, as is Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — although he could also run for governor.

Derek Dooley — former University of Tennessee head football coach and the son of former University of Georgia head football coach Vince Dooley — is also considering running. This would be his first foray into politics, and Georgia Republicans’ last attempt to mix football and the Senate didn’t exactly go well. But Dooley is “very close to Kemp,” according to Bluestein. So he might have some staying power in a primary.

Other, big names have taken a pass, however. State legislators and members of Congress that Robinson has spoken to simply don’t find the Senate seat appealing enough. Even though running for statewide office would be the next logical step in their careers, they “just don't want to do it, because Congress is so broke that… many of them are like, why would I want to go do that? Nothing happens.” Others are worried about a potentially favorable midterm environment for Democrats. If 2026 is going to be a good year for Democrats, why waste two years running for a seat you’ll probably lose?

The upshot is that there’s still lots of uncertainty about the Republican nominee. Even the primary polls (which, believe it or not, can be informative this far out from the election) don’t show a consistent frontrunner. Buddy Carter led in a June Republican primary poll with 27 percent of the vote, followed by Collins at 18 percent, Raffensperger at 10 percent, and King at 2 percent. But in April, Collins ran far ahead of Carter in a Trafalgar poll.

The other big question is whether Donald Trump and Brian Kemp will endorse someone. Ideally (for Republicans), the two men will endorse the same person. Kemp previously advised GOP donors to “keep their powder dry” while he and Trump try to find a consensus candidate. But it’s still unclear whether that will happen. The governor and the president famously haven’t always gotten along, and finding someone palatable to both the MAGA base and the party’s more moderate wing is easier said than done.

Kemp is “closer to John King than Buddy Carter,” said Bluestein, who has reported extensively on the potential joint endorsement. But even if Trump and Kemp can find someone they both like, the field won’t clear completely: King and Carter have vowed to stay in the race even if someone else gets the nod from Trump. Still, a Trump-Kemp endorsement would confer frontrunner status on pretty much any primary candidate.

Who are The Deciders?

It’s less clear that the endorsement would help Republicans in the general. On one hand, an early endorsement could prevent a damaging primary where candidates try to outflank each other on the right and impress Trump. On the other hand, Georgia Republicans want to avoid another Herschel Walker situation where the field empties after a Trump endorsement, clearing the way for a sub-par (to put things politely in Walker’s case) candidate.

The underlying risk from either of these scenarios is the same: ending up with a Republican candidate who is seen as too extreme and/or close to Trump. Why would that be such a problem? Because to win, the Republican candidate will have to appeal to those Atlanta metro voters I mentioned earlier. Robinson calls this group “The Deciders” — a name that hopefully doesn’t need too much explanation.

As I’ve said, these are exactly the voters who have moved toward Democrats in recent years. The 2022 Georgia gubernatorial and Senate races nicely illustrate their importance. Walker underperformed Brian Kemp across the entire state, but he did especially poorly among The Deciders. Based on the exit polls, Kemp narrowly won college graduates (R +1) while Walker lost that group decisively (D +7). And across the 11 counties that make up the Atlanta metro area, Walker underperformed Kemp by an average of 11.3 points.⁴ He trailed behind Kemp by just 6.8 points in the rest of the state, by comparison.

Importantly, because of how populous the Atlanta metro area is, a Republican candidate who does badly enough there can lose even if they perform adequately with Republicans elsewhere in the state. For example, Walker won Houston County (population of 174,897) in central Georgia in 2022. But his 9.5 percent underperformance in that county relative to Kemp translated to only 5,405 fewer votes. Meanwhile, both candidates lost DeKalb County (population of 770,307) in suburban Atlanta. But there, Walker’s similarly-sized 10.7 percent underperformance of Kemp worked out to a deficit of 18,336 votes.

Robinson’s take on how Republicans can avoid this problem in 2026 is simple: “I think we need a serious person.”

Ossoff has an edge, even if other forecasters are too shy to admit it

I’m simplifying a bit, but we can think about two possible outcomes here. First, Republicans could nominate someone who electrifies their base but isn’t as appealing to the more moderate college-educated voters in the Atlanta metro area. If that happens, it’s safe to say Ossoff has a clear edge and is favored to win reelection. Alternatively, Republicans in Georgia could nominate a serious person — meaning someone closer to the Brian Kemp side of a Kemp-MTG scale. But even in that scenario, would the race be a toss-up?

That’ll partially depend on Ossoff and how he approaches The Deciders. In 2022, Democrats won the Senate seat by “getting 40 percent of that group” according to Bullock. “Kamala Harris does a bit better than that, but she just gets killed among white non-college educated voters.” So Ossoff has a good shot at winning in 2026 if he can hold onto the Harris margins among white voters with college degrees but outperform her among white non-college voters. That doesn’t seem too hard to accomplish: in 2020 Ossoff overperformed Joe Biden among white voters without college degrees. He won 24 percent of that group in his runoff — not great, but better than Biden’s 20 percent.

Ossoff’s strong past performance — combined with a national environment that’ll probably swing left — is good news for Democrats. But what do the forecasters think? There’s a split between the more qualitative handicappers and those who use models similar to what we’ll publish next year at Silver Bulletin. The former group is more bearish on Ossoff than the above factors might suggest. The Cook Political Report and Sabato's Crystal Ball rate Georgia’s senate race as a tossup, and Inside Elections has the race as “battleground Democratic” (they don’t have a toss-up category). But Race to the WH rates the race “lean Democratic.” And their forecast (based on a mix of polls and “fundamentals” like how the state has voted historically) gives Ossoff an 81 percent chance of winning the race against a generic Republican.

In May, Sabato's Crystal Ball wrote “We are keeping Georgia as a Toss-up in our ratings as we see how the field develops following Kemp’s announcement, but it’s closer to being Leans Democratic than Leans Republican.” And to be fair to the handicappers, we’re still a year and a half out from the midterms. Some extra uncertainty might be warranted. Ossoff’s approach to the race has already changed dramatically. Coming off of Trump’s 2024 win, Ossoff focused on bipartisanship. In December, he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he would actively seek opportunities to “find common ground with Trump and other Republicans.”

But fast forward a few months, and he’s all in on anti-Trump messaging. “Not only has Jon Ossoff been very aggressive and confrontational in his approach to President Trump, but he even called for him to be impeached, which is not [a stance]... many other U.S. Senators have taken in competitive races,” said Bluestein. Ossoff ended his re-election launch event by exclaiming “Georgia will bow to no king” and has attacked Trump over his administration’s cuts to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (headquartered in Atlanta).

That’s not exactly a surprising change in strategy. Donald Trump’s approval rating will probably fall further between now and November 3rd, 2026. And much of Trump’s domestic policy agenda (like cuts to Medicaid) is unpopular. But according to Bluestein, “in Georgia, it's really hard, if not impossible, for a Democrat to purely win with Democratic voters. Because unless you expand the electorate a lot or get a lot of Republicans to stay home… you can't do it.” So Ossoff will have to balance catering to his Democratic base with his appeals to more moderate Republicans.

And his attempts to do so while tying the eventual Republican nominee to Trump will be counterbalanced by Republicans arguing that Ossoff is too liberal for Georgia. King has already labeled Ossoff “California’s third Senator”. At the moment, these arguments focus on Ossoff’s opposition to Trump’s budget bill, his vote against making it a Title IX violation for states to allow transgender women to participate in female sports, and his vote for a resolution to stop the sale of certain weapons to Israel.

But uncertainty about the eventual dynamics of the general election isn’t a good enough reason to call a race a toss-up. Even in a vacuum, the Democratic lean in another anti-incumbent cycle in 2026 is probably enough to outweigh Georgia’s now very small Republican lean relative to the country overall. And all the polling data we have also points toward Ossoff being the favorite.

We’ve seen six publicly released general election polls since January, all testing different combinations of Republican candidates against Ossoff. In a simple average, Jon Ossoff would get 46.8 percent of the vote if the election were held today and the Republican candidate would get 38.6 percent.⁵ Buddy Carter trailed Ossoff by 7.4 points in the most recent poll (conducted by Cygnal in June); Derek Dooley and John King ran 9.8 and 9.0 points behind Ossoff, respectively. Ossoff beat Carter, Kelly Loeffler, Collins, and King by between 2.4 and 3.9 points in an earlier May Cygnal poll, with Collins performing the best. Raffensperger, who gained some bipartisan cred by refusing Trump’s overtures to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia in 2020 and overturn the result, was the bright spot for the GOP, tied with Ossoff in that poll (R+0.2).

Will Ossoff actually win by 8 points in 2026? Probably not. Some of his strong performance comes down to Republican candidates’ lack of name recognition. You can already see the effect fading. In the January WPA poll, no Republican candidate broke 35 percent support and about 20 percent of respondents were undecided in each matchup. But in June, Cygnal had the undecided figure at 9 to 10 percent and the Republican candidates averaged 41 percent support. As the Republican candidates become better known statewide, they’ll probably further close the gap with Ossoff.

But close wins count in elections. And these are good numbers for Ossoff, who has a solid lead against most potential opponents. True, he’s polling below 50 percent in most matchups. But the importance of that rule-of-thumb is greatly exaggerated.⁶

That’s why it’s hard to justify saying there’s no current favorite in this race, and people actually putting money on the line have Ossoff as better than a 2:1 favorite. Is the Georgia Senate seat one of the GOP’s top targets in 2026? Yes. Will the race be competitive? Almost certainly. And do Democrats have any hope of retaking the Senate in 2026 if they lose in Georgia? Not really. But Kemp is out of the race. And given Georgia’s trend toward the tipping point, even a slight shift in the national environment from 2024 would lead to an Ossoff win — a win that Democrats can’t take for granted, but badly need.

1. Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, and Rockdale.

2. Of course, Harris lost ground in the rest of the state relative to Biden, which is why she lost Georgia by 2.2 points.

3. The national average is 12.1 percent.

4. Here, I’m looking at the difference between Brian Kemp’s margin in the November 8th, 2022 general election and Herschel Walker’s margin in the December 6th, 2022 runoff.

5. This average is across polls and Republican candidates and does not include polls of candidates who have declined to run like Brian Kemp and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

6. Incumbents polling above 50 percent are unlikely to lose. But incumbents who lead in the polls but with less than 50 percent support are still pretty likely to win.