How Georgia got its swing back: Why the formerly red state is now up for grabs

CUMMING, Ga. – Rebekah Peltz and Jordan Frechtman didn’t know about Forsyth County’s sordid history when they moved here from Los Angeles in 2021.

At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was raging and the couple longed to escape the congested West Coast city to live closer to family in the east.

Greater Atlanta’s burgeoning film industry appealed to the two entertainment professionals. And Democratic victories in Georgia by President Joe Biden and Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in the 2020 election made the state a more appealing place for them to settle.

“We were like ‘Wow, it's a good time to be in Georgia. Let's go!” Peltz, 30, remembered thinking at the time of the move.

They packed their bags and bought a home in Cumming, an exurb located a cool 50 minutes from the city’s bustling downtown with affordable housing prices, abundant land and a quieter way of life.

Over the past decade, droves of people like them from traditionally Democratic states have flooded the Greater Atlanta area in search of cheaper housing and a better way of life.

The growth has spilled out from Democratic strongholds like Fulton and Dekalb County near the city center, to once Republican-leaning bedroom counties like Gwinnett and Cobb, and now further north, where new residents are coming to ruby red Cumming.

They've helped turn this once-conservative stronghold into a swing state. And Democratic party activists view the increased migration as an opportunity to eventually reclaim Georgia as a Democratic territory.

In 2022 alone, Georgia saw a net rise of more than 70,000 people who moved from other parts of the country, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The demographics of these movers skewed liberal: many were young, college educated and from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the national voting rights organization Fair Fight Action and former campaign manager to Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, cautioned that these “demographics aren’t destiny,” and that Democrats still have their work cut out for them in the state. But they do suggest that the scales are tipping leftward.

“When you're looking at who you're going to target and how you're going to spend money, that can be your margin,” Groh-Wargo said. “Those folks are critically important.”

Stacey Abrams’ Affect

Biden’s surprising 2020 victory in Georgia marked the first win for a Democratic presidential candidate in the state since 1992.

In many ways it was the culmination of years of pavement-stomping work by Democratic activists who sought to register thousands of disenfranchised Black voters across Georgia, and incentivize millions of other Democratic-leaning voters who did not typically cast a ballot in elections.

In 2012, Abrams, then the Democratic leader in Georgia’s state house, and Groh-Wargo noticed that there were hundreds of thousands fewer Democratic voters than Republican voters in the state.

They also saw an opportunity: large swaths of unregistered Black voters and “a huge number of predominantly Black Democrats moving from the Rust Belt,” Groh-Wargo said.

Two years later, they created the New Georgia Project which began slowly chipping away at the voter registration gap and continued after they exited in 2017 to focus on Abrams' campaign. The New Georgia Project went on to register more than 200,000 new voters ahead of Abrams' 2018 gubernatorial run and more than 800,000 before the 2020 presidential election.

Around the same time, Atlanta began experiencing a cultural boom. Hip Hop had a heavy presence in the city beginning in the 1980s, but by the mid-2010s, a bevy of up-and-coming rappers out of Atlanta began to define the genre. The 2016 premiere of Donald Glover’s show “Atlanta,” gave further clout to the city.

Then came “y’allywood.” A tax incentive for film productions signed into law by former Gov. Sonny Perdue in 2008 helped spur a movie and TV industry in Georgia. Hit shows like "Stranger Things" and "The Walking Dead" began filming in the suburbs, and Marvel Studios started shooting its massive superhero productions on soundstages just south of the city.

Amongst this resurgence, the city was making strides to turn 33-miles of neglected railroad tracks that wrapped around Atlanta’s core into a bike trail called the Beltline.

Luxury apartments, high-end restaurants and markets began to dot completed portions of the trail in 2015, attracting hordes of new residents.

Don Lowell, 54, remembers the changes well. He grew up down the street from what is now Krog Street Market – a former industrial-building turned food hall – and has lived in a one-square-mile radius of the area since the 1990s.

A retail manager at a boutique on the outskirts of the market, Lowell's rent has increased dramatically as the area near the center of Fulton County has become more densely populated. Five years ago, Lowell said he was renting a two-bedroom 1920s bungalow for $900. Today, he’s paying $1,350 for a studio apartment and is nearly priced out of the neighborhood.

The changes aren’t all bad, Lowell said as he ate his lunch at a picnic table underneath a metal awning outside of the market.

A true-blue Democrat, Lowell believes the influx of mostly young people into the area has helped juice Democratic margins in Fulton County and contributed to Biden’s 2020 victory.

“No one expected that,” Lowell said, skewering pieces of pasta salad onto his fork. “It was close, but no one thought it was going to be that close.”

Fulton County’s population increased by about 15% between 2005 and 2022. President Barack Obama won the county with 67% of the vote in 2008. Biden topped that in 2020 by more than 10% with close to 73% of the vote and 381,144 votes. The story was much the same in other Democratic counties encompassing parts of Atlanta.

Dontaye Carter, an officer in the Fulton County Democratic Party, said he views the increased turnout as a result of ongoing voter outreach efforts and Atlanta’s population growth over the last decade.

“If you've got an engine, and you bring in new parts to an engine that's already running, all it does is speed things up,” Carter said. “That's what we're seeing.”

Gwinnett’s transformation

As people like Lowell slowly became priced out of Atlanta’s interior neighborhoods, growth began to spike in the once-sleepy suburban counties that surrounded the city – Gwinnett, Cobb, Clayton and Henry.

Gwinnett and Cobb now each top the list of counties in Georgia where people are moving from other states. The population boom is apparent nearly everywhere you look.

New six-story apartment buildings shoot up from the ground at intersections, and the small sapling trees around them haven’t yet grown in.

Artificial green grass and multi-colored Adirondack chairs fill the recently renovated and newly built downtown centers, like Duluth and Peachtree Corners.

The county's Hispanic population grew by 36% over the past decade, according to the Atlanta Regional Council. The counties Asian population grew by 60% between 2000 and 2019.

As the population has increased, so too has the share of votes Democrats have received in these counties. Take Gwinnett, for example.

Between 1980 and 2012, the county was a Republican stronghold ‒ but support was eroding. Former President George W. Bush won it by a more than 30-point margin in the 2000 presidential election. In 2012, then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won Gwinnett by only 9%.

A mere eight years later, Biden took it with an 18.2% margin .

Brenda Lopez, chair of the Gwinnett County Democrats, partially attributes the monumental shift to the local party’s voter outreach efforts. Starting in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, she said they noticed a spike in the number of voters who did not have a voting history in Georgia.

Normally, they would have labeled that group inactive voters – a group considered unlikely to participate in elections – and wouldn’t have invested as much time or money on getting them to the polls.

But the party realized that many of those voters were just new residents who didn’t have data because they had never voted in Georgia. They dropped millions of dollars on targeted outreach to the newcomers, through mailings, canvassing initiatives, and local events.

The energy was palpable.

Tangi Johnson, 28, remembers getting knocks on her door multiple times a week in 2020 from people asking if she was registered to vote. Johnson had moved to Georgia in 2011 from Ohio with her mom to get a change in scenery, but hadn’t felt the political forces in the state as intensely until that year.

“It was a different experience,” she said.

Political destiny

Statewide, this year's predictions for the state remain close. Republican Donald Trump leads Democrat Kamala Harris by just over 1 percentage point, according to recent polls , though results are within the margin of error.

Polls are rarely conducted at the county level, so it's impossible to know now how close the race will be in Atlanta's burgeoning suburbs, though voter turnout in the densely populated region could sway the results of the election in Georgia.

But Democratic political strategists are all-too aware of the political fatigue voters are feeling. When asked about what the trend of apathy means for the future political tilt of the battleground state, they frequently repeat Stacey Abrams mantra: “Demographics are not destiny.”

“We're a battleground state,” Groh-Wargo said. “Nobody should feel comfortable. This is not easy. It's not going to be easy. It's gonna be a fight for the long haul.”

Republicans are also trying to garner support from new residents, particularly those of diverse backgrounds.

The Republican National Committee in 2022 opened a Hispanic Community Center in Gwinnett as part of a multi-million outreach effort to build support for the party. The venue hosted candidate forums and events, including a World Cup watch party, designed to bring the community together though it closed in early 2023 with the end of that year's RNC budget.

Sammy Baker, chair of the Gwinnett County GOP, said the local party has continued targeted outreach to diverse voter communities through door-knocking campaigns and local events.

He sees the most opportunity for Republicans with Latino and Asian business owners who might respond to the party's economic platform.

"As they make more inroads owning businesses and buying homes and things like that, I think you're seeing them move more Republican," he said.

The challenge, he added, is getting those voters out to the polls. Baker doesn't believe Republicans will ever fully be able to win back Gwinnett County, but with greater outreach efforts, he said he could "see it being half Republican and half Democrat."

Lopez, on the other hand, sees not only a Democratic-leaning Gwinnett County, but a Democratic Georgia by the 2032 presidential election. That's only possible if there’s continued investment in reaching out to new communities of voters.

“We haven't saturated the number of Democratic votes that we can get out of Gwinnett County, and we're not talking about 12,000 votes. We're talking about well over hundreds of 1000s of votes," she said. “It's a matter of who touches them first, who reaches out first."

Forsyth: The next frontier

If Georgia is a battleground swing state, Kannan Udayarajan, chair of the Forsyth County Democratic chapter said he sees Forsyth , north of Atlanta, as “the frontline of that battleground.”

For much of the 20th Century, Forsyth was a sundown town – not a single Black person lived within the county's 247 square miles. A white mob in 1912 forced out its roughly 1,100 Black residents after three Black men were accused of raping two white women.

When, in 1987, protesters marched through Forsyth to shed light on its racist underbelly, they were met with jeers and rocks hurled by white supremacists, including members of the Klu Klux Klan. The violence prompted Oprah Winfrey to film an hour-long special in the county, calling it the “battlefield of the civil rights movement” of that decade.

Today, the divisions are less Black and white, and more red and blue.

Situated northeast of Gwinnett, Forsyth was the fastest growing county in Georgia and the 15th fastest across the U.S. in 2020, according to the Census Bureau.

Much of that growth has come from an increase in south Asian residents. Between 2010 and 2019, the Asian population in the county quadrupled. Asians now represent 18% of Forsyth’s residents, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission.

More population growth is expected soon.

The county government recently approved an 84-acre development project that would include 1,800 multi-family housing units and an 18,500-seat arena as the home of a national hockey team the county is vying for.

The project mimics a development called The Battery, built in Cobb County in 2017, that included a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves baseball team, along with a shopping area and thousands of apartments, condos and townhouses. It 's credited with causing an uptick in growth in that county, which also has shifted Democratic over the last several election cycles.

Udayarajan believes Forsyth is on a similar political trajectory as Cobb, Gwinnett and other bedroom communities closer to Atlanta. In 2012, Romney won 80% of the vote in the county. Trump received only 66% support in 2020.

Without Forsyth, Udayarajan argues Biden would have lost Georgia. The county, he said, saw more than 16,000 new Democrats vote in that election, roughly 5,000 more than the margin Biden won the state by.

Udayarajan isn’t the only one who sees the possibility. This year marks the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has opened a local campaign office in Forsyth.

A sign of the energy building among Democrats in the area? The local party was expecting 60 people to show up to the office 's grand opening. More than 300 people came, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear who was once on the shortlist to become Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate.

“There is a certain sense at the top leadership around the importance of the work that needs to be done in Forsyth County,” Udayarajan said.

Nikki Melendez has watched the building momentum – and political tensions – with an outsider's perspective.Melendez, 20, moved to Cumming in 2017 with her family. As a military child, she had previously lived all over the world, including Germany, New Jersey, and a sleepy town in Oklahoma.

She described Forsyth as in a “metamorphosis stage.”

During the 2020 election, she said Biden-Harris signs were scattered across lawns on one section of her block, and on the other were Trump signs , and bumper stickers with conspiracy theories.

“A lot of people who have lived here forever get a little angry when you talk about all the moving,” she said.

“There's a lot of growth happening,” Melendez added. “It's Cumming. There's no other way to put it.”

( This story has been updated to fix a typo and add context.)

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Georgia got its swing back: Why the formerly red state is now up for grabs