What happened in Georgia
So how did it happen?
We can get some sense by looking at the Ossoff-Perdue contest specifically. In November, Warnock and Loeffler were the top two vote-getters in a crowded field, meaning that both had relatively low percentages of support in many counties. The Ossoff-Perdue contests provide a more comparable baseline.
In November, Perdue won 49.7 percent of the vote to Ossoff’s 47.9 percent. Perdue’s lead was a bit under 100,000 votes. As of this writing on Wednesday morning, Ossoff had narrow leads on both the overall margin and (obviously) votes.
The change can be visualized to some extent by comparing turnout and margin shifts since November. In counties where turnout was higher as a percentage of November’s total, the margin tended to shift more heavily to Ossoff. In counties where turnout was lower relative to November, the margin tended to shift more to Perdue.
How to read this graph: Each circle represents a county. Larger circles are counties where more votes were cast. Circles to the left of the vertical line are counties that shifted toward Ossoff since November. Circles higher on the graph had more turnout relative to November. Blue circles backed Biden in November; red backed Trump. The line shows the rough trend in the relationship between margin and turnout.
That’s a loose correlation, as the graph above suggests. More important is that so many of the circles are to the left of that vertical line; that is, so many counties shifted to Ossoff since November. (It’s important to note that these numbers are still preliminary, pulled from the state’s results page on Wednesday morning.)
We can see that when we look at the changes since November as a function of how urban or rural each county is. Grouping counties into six buckets (using federal categorizations), we see that Ossoff’s vote share increased more than Perdue’s across the board. More importantly, although the number of votes he received in the most heavily urban counties dropped more than the votes Perdue received, in every other category Perdue’s vote totals dropped more.
An important factor here: There’s only one county — Fulton County — in the most urban category.
We can see another effect if we compare the margin shift to the density of the Black population in each county. Counties with larger Black populations shifted more heavily to Ossoff.
Again, most counties shifted to Ossoff more heavily. But comparing Ossoff’s percentage of the vote in November with what he earned in January shows how his support jumped more in counties with denser Black populations.
When we do the same visualization for Perdue, the results are different. In some large, heavily Black counties, Perdue’s share of the vote dropped.
Watch that blue dot in the upper left hand corner of the graph, for example. That’s Clayton County. Perdue’s support dropped from 13.4 percent in November to 11.6 percent as of this writing, while Ossoff’s improved by four points. That’s a six-point swing in a county that’s more than 60 percent Black.
While those shifts in heavily Black counties were important, we should not undervalue the drop in support for Perdue in less-heavily-Black counties, too. Perdue’s vote total decreased the most relative to November in more-heavily-White counties.
In just counties that are about 30 percent Black or less, he saw a drop of 190,000 votes to Ossoff’s 70,000 votes — more than his margin in November. One likely reason: the lack of Trump on the ballot directly meant that fewer Republicans motivated by Trump came out to vote.
While the comparisons between November and January aren’t as clean for the Warnock-Loeffler race, we can compare it to the Biden-Trump race that was occurring at the same time. In 140 of Georgia’s 159 counties, Warnock outperformed Biden by an average of 0.8 percentage points. Loeffler outperformed Trump in only 82 counties.
Biden beat Trump in the state by 11,779 votes, as Trump would be the first to remind us. Ossoff’s lead is currently more than 16,000 votes, with mostly mail ballots from heavily Democratic counties left to count.
The odds are good, then, that between Nov. 2, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, Georgia went from being a state with two Republican senators and that voted for the Republican candidate in the previous presidential election to being a state with two Democratic senators-elect and that preferred a Democratic presidential candidate.
