Republicans are close to losing Georgia for good

Narrow wins by Georgia Democrats in both the presidential race and Senate runoffs give both political parties reason to hope for the next election cycle. Will the state keep getting bluer, as Virginia did? Or will it turn out to be more like North Carolina, a Southern state that veered back toward Republicans after Democrats pulled off a thin victory in 2008, leading to multiple cycles of false hope for the blue team?

A look at the data and other qualitative factors suggest Georgia is more likely to go down the same path as Virginia — and perhaps at a faster pace.

The numbers already point to a Virginia-like evolution for Georgia. If you use 2004 as a starting point — the high water mark for the Republican Party in the Sun Belt in recent memory — the shift toward Democrats in Virginia, Colorado, Georgia and even Texas has been about the same over the last 16 years, with all four states moving 17% to 18% toward Democrats.

The same can't be said for North Carolina, which has shifted only 10% toward Democrats over the past 16 years. North Carolina was 4% more Democratic than Georgia was in 2004, but today it's 2.5% more Republican than Georgia.

A demographic comparison of Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina shows that North Carolina has the worst profile for Democrats when it comes to the two biggest factors driving partisan trends right now: race and education. Blacks' share of the population in Georgia is 33%, compared with the low 20s in Virginia and North Carolina. For education, 37% of Virginia's population over age 25 has at least a bachelor's degree, exceeding 30% in Georgia and North Carolina.

So one way to think about it is that while Georgia and Virginia each have a key blue-trending factor — race in Georgia and education in Virginia — North Carolina has neither, meaning if all else is equal, both Virginia and Georgia should be bluer than North Carolina.

Demographic shifts may have made Georgia competitive, but it's been candidates and campaigns that delivered victories for Democrats and could give the party more of a qualitative edge going forward. Over the past several years, but especially in 2018 and 2020, Democrats have invested in Georgia more than they ever have in North Carolina.

Senator-elect Jon Ossoff's run for Georgia's sixth congressional district in the 2017 special election required tens of millions of dollars to identify and mobilize voters in the north Atlanta suburbs. Stacey Abrams's run for governor had a similar effect statewide in 2018. And then in 2020, between both Joe Biden's run for President and the two Senate races, Democrats invested hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign infrastructure and voter mobilization. Between the general election and the Senate runoffs they contacted every single Hispanic voter in the state.

As attention turns to statewide elections in 2022, Democrats are the party with candidates who are attractive to a broader electorate while Republicans struggle with infighting and party personalities that are increasingly extreme.

In the same way that Senators-elect Ossoff and Raphael Warnock ran as a team in the runoff elections, Warnock, who's up for reelection in 2022, may find ways to work as a team with Abrams should she choose to make another run for governor. Warnock might decide to focus on the accomplishments of the Biden administration and driving up rural Black turnout while Abrams makes her pitch to suburban Atlanta families about what she'll do about education using the levers of state government.

Meanwhile Republicans aren't sure if any of their embattled statewide incumbents, from Gov. Brian Kemp to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, will be able to stave off primary challenges from loyalists to President Donald Trump who are upset about Trump's loss in the state. And they'll also have to find a challenger to Warnock in the Senate race who won't put off Black and suburban voters even more than outgoing Sen. Kelly Loeffler did.

Structurally, Georgia Republicans are dealing with the fact that they've lost most of their party leaders who had broad-based popularity, such as former Gov. Nathan Deal, who hit his term limit, and former Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired. They lost their two main suburban congressional seats in 2018 and 2020. And they've lost countless other suburban state House and Senate seats over the past two cycles, thinning their bench and leaving them with elected officials who may struggle to cobble together a statewide coalition.

What Republicans here really need is for the party to turn away from Trump, giving them a chance to win back voters who rejected the party because of the president, or create a big enough voter wave against Democrats in 2022 and 2024 to offset all the structural forces working against them. Barring either, we may be only a couple of years away from conventional wisdom regarding Georgia as a locked-in blue state.

Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He has been a contributor to the Atlantic and Business Insider.