The Clinton campaign isn't contesting Georgia: this is a fact, and a sad one. Even if all of the other signals weren't there, the fact that the Barksdale campaign - which ran about 4-5 months behind the Nunn campaign in terms of reaching out to the non-core ATL county parties on volunteer efforts - still managed to beat the Clinton campaign to the punch on this tells the story.
Any reason why they decided not to?
Could be any number of reasons. Georgia has 10 million people spread across 159 counties, so it's very difficult to coordinate that many entities. There are a lot of county parties that effectively exist only on paper, so there is a tendency for campaigns to focus on a narrow subset of counties where the share of the Democratic vote is large and the parties are actually active/engaged.
I admit that I'm gauging this on my personal experience with the campaigns, so this one part is anecdotal...I'm in the heavily Republican north, which often gets left out as a whole due to its lack of county-by-county Democratic organization and sheer margins, but...I'm also in the largest county in North Georgia outside of the metro and the one that generally serves as the "hub" for coordinating the other surrounding counties wrt training events, distribution of campaign paraphernalia, etc. We usually get contacted earlier by the campaigns.
We did a hell of a job in Whitfield in 2014 if you look
at the swing in the Governor's race and that got noticed. When you combine that, our relative activity compared to the other surrounding counties and the county's population + demographics, one assumes that if they were reaching out at all in this part of the state, then they'd reach out here first. Because of that, I'm betting that none of the other counties were contacted earlier and that our experience is a relative barometer.
