I agree the Dem ceiling is very high. IMO its going to be "South Maryland" by the 2030's with just a rump rural R base and Dems routinely clearing 60% in presidential elections. The demographic trends are even more of a slam dunk than VA 2008-2020, and the Dem base more committed than the VA Dem base.
If this happens, enough migration etc to cause the state become solid Dem, I believe it'll be the first ever example of a US safe state whose governing party is predominantly composed of black people. This is potentially interesting, as in this scenario, it's possible you'll see self-reinforcing trends. State government passes stuff like policing reform, rural white R voters get increasingly disillusioned and move to other states like Florida, potentially causing Republican support to drop even in rural areas of the state, whilst black people elsewhere (e.g. in Alabama) find Georgia an increasingly favourable place to move to. Which could make such a Dem trend in the state even more pronounced.
There's never really been major amounts of white flight on a state level rather than on a city level before, as far as I know, but in theory there's no reason why it couldn't happen, especially given increasing polarization.
Broadly, yes. In the scenario where GA politics diverges dramatically from the rest of the South (maybe MS goes the same way as GA eventually?), it's reasonable to wonder whether Georgia would eventually become a plurality black state by midcentury.
Trying to imagine what the political coalitions would look like in such a scenario...
Do you think Georgia becoming liberal will make other states more conservative?
Well, in theory there would be some geographic sorting. At a minimum, I would expect a >60% Dem Georgia makes South Carolina more conservative than it would otherwise be, because Savannah and Augusta are meaningful metros where people can reasonably move across the river to suit their preferences. There would also be some sorting of GA mountain conservatives into Upstate SC, along with the Chattanooga area of TN, but the numbers might not be as significant. Ultimately, there's an upper limit to this because Atlanta is centrally located and isn't really commutable from out-of-state.
Similarly, if one of LA or MS decisively flips, I expect the other will quickly get more conservative.
There's a question of how much the average person cares about politics in determining where to live. I think it matters somewhat (sometimes really that other preferences are correlated with politics), but there's also the factor that Georgia seems to still be in the public consciousness as a red state. There was a thread posted here a while back that had polling data of both Republicans and Democrats ranking the states. Georgia had a much more favorable rating from Republicans than from Democrats, suggesting that Americans still think of Georgia as a "conservative Southern state". That perception would take time to change, even if it starts to vote Democratic more consistently. And, as long as that perception is in place, conservatives aren't going to avoid Georgia like they might want to avoid California or Massachusetts.
