With the results of the presidential election in Georgia now certified, let’s take a look at the Georgia map by county, taken from the excellent election website of the New York Times. If you look at the map, Georgia looks like a red state. And indeed, Trump won 129 out of the 159 counties, Biden just 30. But like in many of these maps, this is a mirage, because land does not vote, people do. And as Democrats win the counties with high population density, they net a lot of votes in their strongholds.
The picture becomes a lot clearer when you look at the second map, that also shows all 159 counties, but depicts the size of the lead (in votes) with the size of a dot. There are a lot more red dots than blue dots, but most of the red dots are tiny, and some of the blue dots are massive. Do you see the big cluster of huge blue dots? That is the Atlanta metro area. The three biggest dots are the counties of DeKalb (249,854 votes Biden lead), Fulton (243,896 votes) and Gwinnett (75,414 votes). These three counties combined gave Biden a lead of 569,164 votes. Biden won with a statewide margin of 12,670 votes.
If we look ahead to the runoff elections on January 5th that will determine control of the US Senate, it is clear that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will also need to run up large margins in the Atlanta metro area again to win statewide.
Thankfully, the campaigns, Democratic aligned outside organizations and the local Democrats are already working hard to make sure voters will turn out for the runoff elections. I want to especially highlight the work of the local Democrats. They will be canvassing, phone banking, texting, vote tripling, dropping campaign literature and waving signs in their communitites. They are especially effective, because they are talking to their neighbors and can connect in ways that only members of the same community can. DeKalb Democrats are just now hiring local staffers who will do excatly that.
Unfortunately, the County Committees are notoriously underfunded and harmstrung by a lack of money. But paying staffers, paying rent for office space, printing literature, PPE and other stuff costs quite a lot money.
Let’s make sure that local Democrats in the key counties of DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett don’t run out of money when they are fighting for a Democratic Senate. Please split a donation between these three County Committees via ActBlue.
If you are interested in a deeper dive into the runoff campaign, check out my diary This is how we are going to win the GA runoffs - a (nearly) complete guide.