A lasting change in the road to the White House
Runoff election shows Georgia remains a crucial battleground, along with formerly solid-red Arizona.
WASHINGTON — When President Biden won Georgia and Arizona en route to the White House in 2020, many Republicans called the outcome a fluke, a onetime response shaped by a deadly pandemic.
Tuesday’s Senate runoff in Georgia, together with the November election results in Arizona, proved that argument wrong.
The two states, both solidly Republican a few years ago, now have four senators elected as Democrats to full six-year terms. Arizona won’t have a Republican in the Senate or the governorship for the first time since 1950. (Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat when she won election in 2018, announced Friday that she’s changing her affiliation to independent, which will protect her against a primary challenge if she runs for reelection in 2024.)
The midterm outcome makes clear that the nation’s political battleground has shifted: The road to the White House in 2024 will run through the South and Southwest. The big industrial states bordering the Great Lakes, which dominated the last several presidential election cycles, remain important, but no longer as exclusively.
That will change not only where presidential candidates campaign, but also the nature of the voters on whom they focus.
For Democrats, the shift will intensify the need to mobilize the Black and Latino voters whose support — and large turnout — they need to win Southern and Southwestern states. For Republicans, the fact that both states have relatively young electorates could draw greater attention to the party’s growing deficit with millennial and Gen Z voters.
A shrinking list
A generation ago, a majority of states were at play in presidential campaigns. No longer. The list of truly competitive states has steadily shrunk. Even as Georgia and Arizona have joined the list, other states have dropped off.
Florida, which was among the most closely divided states from 2000 to 2016, shifted heavily toward the GOP in 2020 and moved even further in this year’s midterms, in part because of
the gains Republicans have made among Latino voters in the state. Given the high cost of campaigning there, Democrats aren’t likely to sink significant time and money into trying to capture Florida in 2024, especially if Gov. Ron DeSantis is the GOP nominee.
Similarly, Ohio, the quintessential election battleground for decades, appears to have moved out of reach for Democrats — with the possible exception of Sen. Sherrod Brown — after the white working-class voters who predominate there shifted to the right in the Trump era.
On the other side of the ledger, states with large shares of college-educated voters have become increasingly difficult for the GOP to win.
This year’s midterms were especially troublesome for Republicans in two states in that category. In Colorado, Republican Joe O’Dea’s inability to come close to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, who won reelection with 56% of the vote, indicates that the once-purple state can be considered solidly blue. And the GOP’s failure to make significant gains in Virginia suggests that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s victory in 2021 may have limited predictive value.
Both of the major parties begin presidential contests with about 220 electoral votes they can pretty well count on — 50 short of the 270 needed to win. Arizona’s 11 electoral votes and Georgia’s 16 would cover more than half of that gap.
Partisans may object to writing off some states as noncompetitive — Democrats
continue to dream about making Texas a purple state, for example, and Republicans talk about Minnesota and Oregon. The midterm results, however, don’t show much evidence for those states being close to flipping.
Democrats’ hopes for Texas receded when they lost ground with Latino voters in the state in 2020. While that situation didn’t worsen in November, it didn’t get better.
As for GOP stretch goals: In Minnesota, Republicans lost their majority in the state Senate, giving Democrats full control of state government. And in Oregon, Democrat Tina Kotek won a three-way race for governor in which Republicans had invested a lot of hope.
Only eight states start the 2024 election cycle truly in doubt: Nevada and Arizona in the Southwest; Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania among the big industrial states; North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast; and New Hampshire in the Northeast.
The midterm elections make that a problematic list for Republicans because, as longtime Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg notes, Democrats made gains in each of the battleground states, even as they suffered setbacks in less competitive states like New York and California.
“There were really two elections in this midterm,” said Rosenberg, who correctly forecast that no red wave would appear this year: “A bluer one in the battleground states and a redder one outside the battleground.”
Of the most competitive states, Democrats probably start out in the best shape in Michigan, where they won the governor’s race and both houses of the Legislature for the first time since 1984 and where the state Republican Party appears mired in factional warfare and far-right conspiracy theories. Pennsylvania also starts off looking strong for Democrats, after successful campaigns for governor and Senate.
Republicans have their best shot in North Carolina, which Democrats have repeatedly targeted but have won only twice in presidential campaigns since the 1960s — with Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008.
Until 2018, most strategists in both parties would have called Georgia a harder target than North Carolina for Democrats, but the opposite has proven true. The reason has a lot to do with the urban-rural divide in American politics.
North Carolina’s two big urban areas, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, have grown rapidly, but the state’s population remains significantly less urbanized than Georgia’s. That difference has been enough to keep the state in the GOP column in most recent elections.
Demographic shifts
In Georgia, the 10-county Atlanta metro region has undergone a rapid demographic shift, with suburban counties that were once destinations for white flight becoming thriving, multiracial communities.
For example, Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, was 55% white in 2004, when John F. Kerry won just one-third of its voters en route to losing his race against President George W. Bush. By 2020, a majority of the county’s population was Black, Latino or Asian, and Biden took 58% of the vote. In Tuesday’s Senate runoff election, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock won 62% in the county.
The same was true across the region. Starting with Stacey Abrams’ unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2018, Democrats have invested heavily in mobilizing the region’s growing and increasingly diverse population, and that effort has paid off: The Atlanta region made up 45% of Georgia’s statewide vote in Tuesday’s runoff, and Warnock won over 70% of it.
In Arizona, the story mostly involves just one county, Maricopa, a sprawling bit of geography that covers Phoenix and its surroundings and is home to roughly 60% of the state’s voters.
In 2004, Kerry took 42% of the Maricopa County vote. The Democratic share grew slowly over the next few election cycles, then jumped in 2018, when Sinema won her Senate race by taking 51% of Maricopa’s vote. Biden beat then-President Trump in the county by 2 percentage points, delivering Arizona to the Democrats for only the second time since 1948. (President Clinton won the state when he was reelected in 1996.)
Last month, Sen. Mark Kelly beat his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, 52% to 46% countywide, with a Libertarian candidate picking up most of the rest of the vote. Kelly’s margin in Maricopa accounted for almost 80% of his statewide advantage over Masters.
As in Georgia, a diversifying pool of voters has played a big role in changing outcomes in Arizona. So, too, has Democrats’ significant spending to mobilize Latino voters. In this year’s Senate race, Latinos made up about 17% of the state’s electorate, according to an
AP VoteCast survey. Those voters sided with Kelly over Masters 59% to 37%, the survey found.
Neither state can be considered solidly in either party’s camp. As Sinema’s move underscored, Arizona has a large number of independent voters who might swing between parties. In Georgia, as Republicans are quick to point out, incumbent GOP Gov. Brian Kemp easily won reelection over Abrams.
And it’s worth noting, as a caveat to Democratic enthusiasm, that the losing candidates in those Senate races, Masters and Herschel Walker, were not exactly the A-Team.
“I’d rather be us than them,” said Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist. “But it’s going to be close. Victory is not assured in either of these states.”