Why did Bill Clinton win Georgia in 1992?

[Schiff for Senate]

Well it was still Carter's state. There were more ancestral Ds there than a state like MS or AL, as well as more urban and black voters.

MS is quite a bit blacker than GA.

[Schiff for Senate]

Zell Miller might have helped a little, as Georgia's Governor at the time. He spoke at the Convention and called President Bush "timid."

His speech really was something.

I know what Dan Quayle means when he says it's best for children to have two parents. You bet it is! And it would be nice for them to have trust funds, too. We can't all be born rich and handsome and lucky. And that's why we have a Democratic Party. My family would still be isolated and destitute if we had not had F.D.R.'s Democratic brand of government. I made it because Franklin Delano Roosevelt energized this nation. I made it because Harry Truman fought for working families like mine. I made it because John Kennedy's rising tide lifted even our tiny boat. I made it because Lyndon Johnson showed America that people who were born poor didn't have to die poor. And I made it because a man with whom I served in the Georgia Senate, a man named Jimmy Carter, brought honesty and decency and integrity to public service.

[Schiff for Senate]

Well it was still Carter's state. There were more ancestral Ds there than a state like MS or AL, as well as more urban and black voters.

MS is quite a bit blacker than GA.

Yes, but this has the counter-intuitive effect of spurring more racial polarization, and therefore driving the white population to vote more homogeneously Republican.

It's also important to understand where these black voters live. In MS, apart from Jackson (and perhaps also Vicksburg, Gulfport/Biloxi, and metro Memphis), most of the black population lives in smaller cities and towns, in the Mississippi River Valley/Delta and the Mississippian section of the Black Belt, which are juxtaposed against and located in close proximity to rural working class white communities, which creates a very racially polarized environment. In GA, you do have a Mississippi-style situation in the Southwest Georgia and in the Georgian section of the Black belt, but you also have even more Black voters in Urban and Suburban metro Atlanta and Savannah (and to a lesser extent Athens, Augusta, Macon/Warner Robbins, Columbus, and Valdosta) whose communities are surrounded more so by white liberal/college educated white communities not as subject to racial polarization.

These are very fair points to raise, and I realize this too (given that MS whites, iirc, vote more Republican than whites in any other state). And yes, unlike GA, TN, AR and even AL (the rural black population isn't that big, while way more blacks live in Montgomery/Birmingham), a significant share of MS blacks live in rural areas. And as you said, their white counterparts (who are still the majority) are just as overwhelmingly Republican. Meanwhile, as you noted, in GA there's places like DeKalb County which have a lot of urban blacks coexisting with urban white voters who are more open to voting Democratic.

Really I was responding to Alben more in terms of the fact that having more black voters doesn't necessarily equate to more statewide Democratic strength. I understood him as saying that more black voters = more Democratic, and used MS and GA to disprove this via counterexample.

Ig by "urban and black" he might've meant "urban black," in which case I agree with him.