BUCKHEAD, GA — When Georgia was unofficially called for Donald Trump, the chandeliers in the Grand Hyatt’s ballroom literally shook.
Georgia Republicans have been waiting eight years to celebrate their state going for a Republican president again, and when Chair Josh McKoon announced that Decision Desk HQ had called it for Trump, the crowd here made the moment count.
(The race was officially called by the Associated Press about two hours later.)
“Tonight, Georgia Republicans are united in total victory,” McKoon told the crowd.
Trump’s flip of the longtime GOP stronghold was hardly surprising to the die-hards at the Republican watch party. For weeks, if not months, Republicans in Georgia seemed at ease with the state’s fate — and Tuesday night showed why.
Biden’s win in 2020 was more aberration than transformation, they said. Trump’s loss in 2020 was “the perfect storm for him to go down,” consultant Eamon Keegan said.
“No doubt about it, it was an outlier,” McKoon told NOTUS after CNN and ABC had also called the state for Trump. “We went back to the center-right vote we normally have in a normal election.”
The return to red was fueled by Republicans in rural areas, who turned out for Trump at an even greater rate than in 2020. In the all-important Atlanta collar counties, Harris failed to increase Joe Biden’s margin over Trump from four years ago in Gwinnett, Fulton and Cobb. (She actually was falling short of Biden’s numbers in Gwinnett and Fulton, according to the most recent data.)
Harris spent the weeks before Election Day barnstorming the Atlanta area, with surrogates also frequenting the metro area while expanding into the southwest part of the state. She held a massive rally in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward on Saturday, while her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, held another rally in Cobb County on Sunday.
The defeat followed warning signs for Harris during early voting. The outstanding Black voter numbers that turned out for Biden in 2020 failed to reach the same heights prior to Election Day. Experts predicted Harris needed Black voters to make up 30% of the electorate to win. They hovered between 26% and 27% during early voting.
For Trump, the result proved that the mass exodus of moderate white suburban women from the GOP was largely a mirage — at least in Georgia.
The Kamala Harris campaign intentionally messaged toward the demographic, believing women who supported Nikki Haley in Georgia’s presidential primary would wind up with Harris, both because of Trump’s antagonistic history with women and Harris’ stance on reproductive rights.
One of those women was Republican strategist Martha Zoller, who told NOTUS over the weekend that she believed Haley voters like her would come home.
Biden’s win was “absolutely” an outlier, Zoller said Tuesday night, though noting that the election, and presumably future elections, would remain close.
“We are not a purple state,” she said.
If Trump had lost, there would’ve been no shortage of excuses for the state’s Republicans. His election antics four years ago turned off portions of the conservative voting base, and he was later indicted in Fulton County for trying to reverse the 2020 election results.
But none of it mattered.
Even the much-maligned racist jokes at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally failed to move the needle much at all.
“I wasn’t offended by some stupid comedian,” Eleazar Fernandez, a Puerto Rican native, told NOTUS outside the ballroom. He didn’t like the joke, but it wasn’t Trump who said it. And Fernandez made sure Trump knew that when he spoke to him on Friday, after being named one of Fulton County’s top volunteers.
“He said, ‘We didn’t know; it was not in the script,’” Fernandez recalled of his conversation with Trump.
Obviously, Democratic candidates can win in Georgia. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have proved it, while other Democrats in statewide races have edged ever closer over the past decade. As Republican operative Cole Muzio told NOTUS, the 2020 outlier happened for a reason.
“Georgia’s baseline is about a +5,” he said. “If you’re unpopular or run a bad race as a Republican, you can lose.”
It doesn’t hurt when some voters are less than thrilled with the alternative — even ones that voted for her.
“I didn’t want to vote for either one of them,” Evelyn, a Black woman, told NOTUS as she left the polling place in Lawrenceville, Georgia. She eventually chose Harris as “the lesser of two evils.”
“I should’ve just voted independent, but I didn’t want to throw away my ballot,” she said.
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Ben T.N. Mause is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.