In 2005 and 2006, two moderate Democratic candidates, Jim Webb and Tim Kaine, won in Virginia with large margins in the Washington suburbs. Their victories demonstrated that there was a new path to victory for Democrats, one that did not depend on winning Southern conservative Democrats, the way Mark Warner did in 2001.
Georgia might well be moving down the same road as Virginia. No other plausibly competitive state — not Nevada or Virginia, not Colorado or North Carolina — has had a change in the racial composition of the electorate that’s as favorable for Democrats. That’s giving Georgia Democrats hope that they might win a race that they almost certainly would have viewed as a lost cause only a few years ago.
Since 2000, the white share of registered voters in Georgia has fallen to 59 percent, from 72 percent. That’s mainly because of demographic change — the white share of eligible voters has fallen to 60 percent from 68 percent over the same period.
What makes this decline particularly helpful for Democrats is that 48 percent of the newly eligible nonwhite voters are black. (Hispanics make up a larger share of newly eligible nonwhite voters elsewhere in the country, and blacks typically vote Democratic in larger proportion.) Over the past decade, Georgia’s pool of eligible black voters grew by nearly 600,000, compared with about 375,000 newly eligible white voters. Some of this is because of generational change, but many new black voters have moved from expensive northeastern cities to growing middle-class suburban communities on the south side of Atlanta.
President Obama lost Georgia by 8 points in 2012. The reason was simple: He posted the worst showing among Georgia’s white voters (he won 18 to 21 percent of them) by a Democrat since George McGovern in 1972.
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