Unlike Florida and North Carolina, states that I expect to stay Titanium Tilt R and Tossup respectively for cycles to come, Georgia does not have
any of the following:
- a booming, influential retiree population (Peachtree City is not The Villages or Brunswick County)
- a Republican-friendly Hispanic voting block (No equivalent to Miami-Dade here)
- stagnant or R-trending suburbs (Gaston, Johnston, Iredell, Davidson, and Union counties in NC)
- a rural white voting block that isn't quite as diehard GOP as in Deep South states (i.e. more room to fall for Dems)
Now, this does mean that there is the potential for the GOP to "blow its load" one last time in Georgia (remember Virginia's 2009 elections?), but after that, it's off to the races until there's a dramatic demographic coalition change.
Of course, Dems won't take full control of Georgia in one fell swoop. The state government wasn't entirely Republican until January 2011, despite having gone Republican in every presidential race since 1996. Georgia voted for Biden in 2020, and who knows what will happen with those Senate seats in January, but I wouldn't expect the state government to become entirely Dem until maybe 2028 or 2030, and the General Assembly may take a bit longer.
Trump accelerated these changes, but he was not the catalyst like some users here may believe. Former governor Nathan Deal did worse in 2014 than he did in 2010, and Henry County voted Dem for the first time in
2014, not 2016. I would expect the shifts in metro Atlanta and the Savannah and Augusta suburbs to slow down with Trump gone, but they won't stop or "reverse".
In other words:
GA starts out at lean D in 24 and could easily stay Democrat even if Republican take back the White House. By 2028 unless demographics or voting patterns reverse themselves the state is probably gone for a political generation for Republicans.
Their isn’t much to counteract the D trend unless Republicans can make inroads with rural African Americans or asians and Hispanics which I guess I could see someday happening.
One or two narrow last hurrahs (2021 runoffs for GA-R and GA-S, 2022 midterms) won’t mean that the dam hasn’t broken. It’s going to be an uphill battle for any Republican to flip it back regardless of their ideological stripe/background, and I don’t see it as a more promising target for the GOP than NM/MN unless there’s a complete D collapse with the black vote (unlikely). There’s literally nothing left for the GOP to counteract D gains in raw votes and %-tage in the Atlanta metropolitan area.