How Trump won Georgia: Vote records show GOP more unified than Democrats in 2024

Trump received 88% of votes from Georgia voters who also chose Republican candidates for Congress and the General Assembly, according to the AJC’s analysis. By comparison, Harris received lower support from her party’s voters, with 79% of them picking a straight Democratic ticket.

“This proves that this is now Trump’s party,” said Jay Morgan, a former Georgia Republican Party executive director who is now a lobbyist. “It’s all about the base.”

Those 2.4 million straight-ticket Republican voters gave Trump the votes he needed for a 115,100-vote win over Harris. Harris received 2 million votes from Georgians who also picked Democrats lower down the ballot. The remaining 830,000 voters chose at least one Republican and one Democrat on their ballots.

The AJC’s analysis of voting patterns was made possible for the first time after the 2024 presidential election by the statewide disclosure of spreadsheets called “cast vote records,” which are a ballot-by-ballot accounting of voters’ choices on each race.

In previous elections, vote totals were provided by candidate, precinct or county, but details of how voters filled out their ballots weren’t available except through individual ballot images. Ballots are public records, but the identities of the voters who cast them remain anonymous.

The secretary of state’s office provided cast-vote records for all 159 counties in response to a request by the AJC through the Georgia Open Records Act.

The voting records provide insights into voters’ behavior, partisanship and political polarization.

While Trump harnessed most Republican-leaning voters this time — avoiding the level of defections that contributed to his narrow loss in 2020 — tens of thousands of his party’s voters still chose Harris instead.

Over 83,000 voters who backed Republican candidates for U.S. House, state House or state Senate also supported Harris at the top of the ballot. Among Democratic voters, about 29,000 who picked Democratic candidates down-ballot picked Trump for president.

Voters who participated in a recent AJC poll said they’re concerned about the country’s political divisions.

“Obviously, the country is polarized, but there’s been a swing after people believed Joe Biden was going to be this moderate, this centrist, and that was not the case,” said Mark Gilford, a semiretired engineer from Flowery Branch. “You should always vote for somebody who you believe is going to represent your ideals. Harris lost that trust.”

The AJC poll showed that 90% of voters who identified as Republicans said they approved of Trump’s transition to the presidency, while 89% of Democrats disapproved.

“I’ve heard from too many people who voted because they believe Trump is the second coming of Christ,” said Jacque Hodges, a retired United Methodist Church pastor from Kennesaw. “His lack of morality, his lack of empathy, is very troubling to me. I think people had blinders on.”

Gov. Brian Kemp rallied Georgians to support Trump before the election, making the case that Trump deserved their votes, even if they dislike him as a person.

Trump, who once lobbed attacks against Kemp after the 2020 election, said before last year’s election that Kemp has “done a really good job” as governor.

“Republicans, in a lot of ways, have been the bigger person to just let bygones be bygones and just do whatever it takes to win,” Kemp told the AJC in an October interview. “That’s been my commitment for well over a year. Now it’s good that everybody else is on the bandwagon.”

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

Credit: Hyosub Shin/AJC

It’s unclear how much Republican attitudes toward Trump changed over the years. Cast-vote data wasn’t widely available after the 2020 election.

But there was significant dissent against Trump from a faction of Republicans, including former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, who opposed Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in 2020 and pitched a more consensus-driven “GOP 2.0” in his book. The Georgia Republican Party voted to expel Duncan last month after he supported Harris.

Split-ticket voters, especially in Atlanta’s suburbs, contributed both to Biden’s win in 2020 and also to victories by Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in their 2021 runoffs for U.S. Senate.

“Republicans have, for years, been coalescing around Donald Trump. He’s become the face of the Republican Party,” said Carl Cavalli, a political science professor at the University of North Georgia. “Democrats have been more willing to abandon their party and split their vote.”

Trump benefited from his personality, giving Republicans someone to rally around, similar to former President Ronald Reagan, Cavalli said. Harris lacked that kind of appeal to Democrats, who in the past aligned behind leaders with strong public images, such as Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.

Democratic state Sen. Derek Mallow faulted Republicans for convincing their voters that they can’t compromise with or accept Democrats.

“Republicans are so polarized, and they have convinced their electorate that you can’t vote for anything but a Republican,” said Mallow, who represents Savannah. “They have trained their voters to believe that a Democrat is evil and that you can’t vote for the best candidate.”

The Republican-led Georgia General Assembly padded Trump’s advantage by passing a law last year that added a Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, to the presidential ballot. Under the new law, third-party candidates earned a place on Georgia’s ballot if they qualified in at least 20 other states. Previously, only Libertarian Party candidates accompanied the Republican and Democratic nominee.

The AJC analysis of the voting data showed that the inclusion of Stein on the ballot siphoned votes from Harris.

About 63% of Stein’s voters also supported a Democrat for Congress, while 61% of Libertarian Chase Oliver’s voters backed a Republicans for Congress, according to cast vote records. Stein received 18,200 votes, and Oliver garnered nearly 20,700 votes.

Oliver already was on the ballot because, under state law, third parties can nominate candidates for statewide office as long as at least one of their candidates received votes from more than 1% of registered voters in the previous general election. Stein’s inclusion on the ballot offset votes that Republican candidates generally lose to Libertarian candidates.

Trump also benefited from two more liberal independent candidates whose names appeared on ballots, Cornell West and Claudia De la Cruz.

Though votes for West and De la Cruz didn’t count because the courts disqualified them, over 13,500 people — most of them Democrats — tried to vote for them, according to cast-vote records. About 69% of West’s voters and 61% of De la Cruz’s voters supported Democrats for Congress, indicating potential lost votes for Harris.

Harris struggled to form a national coalition in her 107-day campaign, which began only when she replaced then-President Joe Biden on the ballot, said Jason Shepherd, a former Cobb County Republican Party chairperson.

“This was an issue with Harris trying to keep the party together. When you get division in an election, it usually has to do with the candidate themselves,” said Shepherd, now a political science professor at Kennesaw State University. “That ended up with more ticket-splitting on the Democratic side.”

— Staff writer Greg Bluestein contributed to this article.