What Just Happened in Georgia?
ATLANTA—Georgia wasn’t supposed to turn blue. Not yet, and especially not in the suburbs of Atlanta, where Newt Gingrich arguably launched the modern conservative movement in the early 1990s and cemented the stereotype of these sprawling neighborhoods as rich, white, and die-hard Republican. This is where a generation of conservative political stars fostered their careers: former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, longtime U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, even Sean Hannity. Before Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, Cobb County hadn’t supported a Democrat for president in 40 years.
But 2020 is a bad year for conventional political wisdom, and Georgia is the big prize of the election: Former Vice President Joe Biden is expected to win the state after the conclusion of a statewide recount, according to projections from CNN, NBC, and The New York Times. Two closely fought U.S. Senate seats will go to a runoff in January, possibly determining which party controls the chamber. And in the north Atlanta suburbs, Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux flipped a U.S. congressional seat in Georgia’s seventh district—one of the national party’s few successful pick-ups anywhere in the country. Georgia is officially a swing state.
Above all, Republican pride was on the ballot in Georgia.Across the counties and towns in the northern part of metro Atlanta, Democrats successfully flipped or held formerly Republican seats at every level of
