How Georgia has voted for President through the years

SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV) – The 60th United States Presidential Election will be held on Tuesday, November 5, and all eyes will be on the Peach State.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz will tour the state, culminating in a Thursday night rally in Savannah. Earlier this month, Former President Donald Trump rallied in Atlanta. Both campaigns are trying to earn every last vote ahead of Election Day.

Why so much emphasis on Georgia? Political junkies will be the first to tell you that while states like Ohio and Iowa dwindle in their habits of being pivotal, decisive states in modern politics, Georgia is a newly-christened swing state.

Georgia has a fascinating political history and record of voting.

The first slate of electors went to George Washington in 1788 and again in 1792. Thomas Jefferson was the first member of a political party to win in the state, the then-newly-formed Democratic-Republican party.

In 1864, there was no presidential election held in the state due to Georgia’s allegiance with the Confederacy during the ongoing Civil War.

Following the end of the war and the ratification of the From 1868 to 1960, the state voted Democratic in every Presidential Election, from Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy.

Barry Goldwater was the first Republican Presidential Candidate to win the state’s electoral votes in 1964. Georgia joined four other deep southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina) in switching from solidly Democratic to Republican. The party switch, similar to the decidedly Democratic swing post-Civil War, was due to the overwhelming backlash from White southerners towards Civil Rights for African Americans. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act that summer rallied the majority of voters in opposition of the Democratic Party.

The switch was dramatic among the electorate. In 1960, the state voted for Kennedy 63% to 37% for Republican Richard Nixon. Goldwater won 54% to 45% four years later, a 17-point swing towards the Grand Old Party (GOP).

Four years later, Georgia joined three of those four states in voting for segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace’s “American Independent” run for President.

It would be 8 more years before Georgia voted for a Democrat again when native son Jimmy Carter ran successfully in 1976, then unsuccessfully in 1980 against Ronald Reagan. The state did gift Reagan its electoral votes by an overwhelming margin when the Republican powerhouse ran for re-election in the landslide election of 1984.

Bill Clinton, the Comeback Kid, made a Democratic comeback in Georgia by edging out a half-percentage-point win in his first run in 1992. That year would be the last time a Democratic nominee for President won in the state. Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton all lost the state by 5 points or more.

After the election of Donald J. Trump, who carried the state, in 2016, the state began to see another change.

African American voter registration rose on the part of organizers like former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and scores of activists who monitored and strengthened voter rolls. Democratic candidate for President Joseph R. Biden’s efforts to win them along with White moderate suburban voters and female voters across the board led to a shift not only in the margins within these demographics but the size of these demographics.

In 2020, Joseph R. Biden became the first Democrat in nearly three decades to win Georgia. A month later, the U.S. Senate Runoffs with Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff saw both Democrats winning for the first time in 20 years and cementing Georgia’s new status as a swing state. The win was by the narrowest margin in the history of Presidential elections in the state: 0.23% (11,779 votes out of nearly 5,000,000 cast). The race was so close that while Election Day was held on November 3, the state wasn’t called by media outlets until November 19 due to the slow trickle of provisional ballots and a state law allowing manual recounts for close elections.

The way of the 2024 Presidential Election, and Georgia’s political future, relies on you, the voter. Visit WSAV’s Your Local Election HQ for places to check your voting status, polling location and any registration deadlines that may approach.