Sitting in a quiet real estate office not far from downtown Milledgeville a few days after the vote, Baldwin County GOP Chair Janice Westmoreland put it simply: “We figured out if we can just get the known Republicans out to vote, we’ll win.”

That’s easier said than done.

For years, campaigns have struggled to both appeal to their base and win over undecided and independent voters. This cycle, Baldwin Republicans focused almost exclusively on driving out Trump voters to vote — including scores of conservative locals who don’t often participate in elections.

This high-risk, high-reward approach of reaching these so-called “irregular voters” is labor-intensive. A group of local volunteers set out to not just contact those scattered residents once or twice, but a half-dozen times starting in the summer. Some said it felt like a full-time job.

Credit: AJC/Greg Bluestein

Credit: AJC/Greg Bluestein

“We came down here to retire, not to work,” quipped Vikki Consiglio, a longtime Republican activist who moved to Baldwin from Henry County a few years ago. “I tell friends, we work so much on the campaign that we really just retired from a paying job.”

She was particularly persistent, using a campaign app that identified likely Republican voters based on a series of data points to return to one household where a woman voted early but the husband didn’t. She told them, only half-jokingly: “Until you vote, I’ll keep coming to your door.”

It paid off. While Vice President Kamala Harris gained 19 more votes in Baldwin County over Joe Biden’s total in 2020, Trump netted about 700 more ballots here than he captured four years ago.

Baldwin’s roughly 20,000 voters didn’t swing the election, of course. Trump won Georgia by a comfortable 116,000-vote margin and captured all seven of the battleground states that decided the White House race.

But the effort to inch Baldwin to the right mirrored the former president’s overall strategy of wringing out every GOP vote he could from the party’s mostly white base to counter Democratic gains in Atlanta’s suburbs.

That’s how Trump flipped Georgia’s 16 electoral votes even though Harris improved markedly on Biden’s vote totals from 2020, outpolling him by roughly 70,000 votes. Trump earned about 200,000 more votes than he did in that election, and more than 130 of Georgia’s 159 counties tilted to his column.

Brandon Phillips, an adviser to Trump’s Georgia campaign, called it a focus on “quality over quantity” as his campaign reached voters who sometimes disdain elections or question whether their vote will make a difference.

“Trump spoke to these people like no politician has before,” he said, “but the campaign did its part in actually activating and getting these individuals to cast a ballot.”

‘We suffered’

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez/AJC

Even so, Democrats face a greater challenge in Georgia, where the overall electorate tends to lean Republican. U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, who chairs the state party, said Democrats can’t afford to focus primarily on base turnout. They must also devote vast resources to wooing independents and former GOP voters to build a winning coalition.

“In a battleground state like Georgia, we didn’t have the option of an either-or strategy,” she said. “That meant we were not as focused as much as I guess we should have on either conversation. And Donald Trump doubled down on his base.”

Howell also can’t help but think of what-ifs. His car broke down a few months ago, making it harder for him to trek throughout the county campaigning for Harris and doing what political insiders call “ballot chasing” — ensuring voters turn in their absentee ballots.

A few days after the vote, he wondered whether that could have helped close the gap in Baldwin as he stressed about Trump’s victory.

“We suffered at the polls,” he said, “and now we might be part of the suffering.”

‘Fish, ski and boat’

Baldwin is the type of place that defies easy explanation. It’s not quite rural and it’s too far from Atlanta’s sprawl to be exurban. Instead, it’s the type of mix that political scientists sometimes define as a “shoulder county” — an in-between sort of place.

With roughly 44,000 residents, Baldwin is poorer and more diverse than Georgia as a whole. But it also has two major college campuses with thousands of students, along with ex-Atlantans seeking solemnity on the banks of Lake Sinclair.

That’s helped make Baldwin one of Georgia’s most politically competitive counties. And although Baldwin voted Democratic in every presidential vote since 2004, the midterms two years ago paint a more complicated portrait of split-ticket politics here.

Credit: ALYSSA.POINTER@AJC.COM

Credit: ALYSSA.POINTER@AJC.COM

In that election, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp beat Democrat Stacey Abrams by six percentage points in Baldwin, and down-ticket GOP candidates won by similar margins. But Republican Herschel Walker only carried the county by 89 ballots — and lost it three weeks later in a runoff to Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

“It’s hard to say whether there’s a huge demographic shift or that you can chalk it up to the Trump phenomenon,” said Scott Buchanan, a Georgia College and State University professor who chairs the political science department.

He notes the county has welcomed some new residents who sought Baldwin’s peaceful lakefront locales during the pandemic. Buchanan lives in that area, and he said the number of Trump signs has ballooned in recent years.

But Buchanan noted there’s also a regional trend.

Like Baldwin, neighboring Washington County also voted GOP in a presidential race for the first time since 2004. And nearby Jefferson County flipped red for the first time since 1988. All three counties have lost residents since 2010, according to U.S. census estimates.

“These areas could be becoming more Republican because of an exodus in population, leaving behind older, whiter residents,” Buchanan said.

For Baldwin’s Republicans, the challenge now is keeping up the momentum.

Robert Binion, a real estate agent from the Milledgeville area, recounted with a laugh how a determined Trump campaign official sent frequent texts gently pressuring him to hit the pavement to knock on doors.

“I was born and bred and grew up here. But there were people I’ve never seen before interested in politics,” Binion said. “It’s new blood, and we’ve got to keep them engaged.”

Credit: undefined

Credit: undefined

For Westmoreland, the local party chair, that’s a particularly delicate task.

“People come to the lake to fish, ski and boat. They’re not really interested in meetings,” she said. “But we’ve built a good database going forward. We are going to reach out. We have to cash in on this as a party.”

Then there’s the question that, for now, is unanswerable. How will Trump’s second term mobilize voters in Baldwin County and beyond — whether it be energizing his supporters or galvanizing his opponents — as both parties prepare for 2026 midterms?

“It’s going to depend on what the next two years of Trump 2.0 will look like,” said Buchanan, the political scientist. “And two years is a long time in politics.”

Data analyst Phoebe Quinton contributed to this report.