JAMES Magazine Online: Election Post-Mortem: Counties that Made the Difference

Phil Kent

Friday, November 15th, 2024

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The Georgia numbers are in from last Tuesday’s general election. Former president Donald Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris by winning the state’s 16 electoral votes with 50.74 percent of the vote.  With 99 percent of the votes counted, the margin between Trump and Harris is 2.2 points. That translates to about 117,000 votes — a Republican shift in the vote margin of nearly 5 points since the 2020 presidential election.  

Many of Georgia’s 159 counties saw a Republican shift, with Webster County seeing the largest change at over 10.5 points. Baker, Dooly, Peach, Quitman and Twiggs County all voted for Trump by wider margins than they did in 2020, emphasizing a trend in line with much of the rest of the state. Oconee County, of all of them, recorded the highest number of Trump votes.  

The final tally shows 134 counties supported Trump more heavily than they did in 2020.  

Henry County, a GOP stronghold just a decade ago, had the strongest Democratic increase at 9.2 points. Harris managed to overperform 2020 Joe Biden numbers in Henry County but remained on par with Biden’s 2020 margins in the more populous Cobb and Gwinnett counties.  

Three counties — Baldwin, Jefferson and Washington — flipped this year, voting for Biden in 2020 and then Trump this time. Interestingly, according to the Savannah newspaper, these counties were also among a group of five split-ticket counties in the 2022 midterm elections, with residents voting for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, alongside Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock. The two remaining counties, Clay and Sumter, both went to Harris by small margins.