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.
