What a difference four years make. At this time in December 2020, Democrats in Georgia were riding so high they could hardly believe their good fortune. They’d pushed Georgia’s two Republican senators into a runoff and President-elect Joe Biden had just become the first Democrat to win Georgia in 28 years.
The electors that day were the top Democrats in the state, including Stacey Abrams, who would soon announce that she would run for governor of Georgia for a second time, and state party chair Nikema Williams, who had just been elected to succeed the legendary late U.S. Rep. John Lewis in Congress.
When it was her turn to speak, Williams declared, “Georgians have known it for years and now the nation knows — Georgia is a blue state.”
We all know now that wasn’t completely accurate, or at least Georgia’s blue-state status didn’t last for long. Although Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won those two Senate runoffs, Republicans swept all but one statewide office (Warnock’s Senate seat) just two years later. And on Tuesday of this week, it was Republicans, not Democrats, smiling from ear to ear as they cast Georgia’s 16 votes for President-elect Donald Trump again.
Josh McKoon, the Georgia GOP chair, declared it a great day to be an American. “The fever has broken,” McKoon said after the count for Trump.
“I think that there’s an acceptance, maybe a grudging acceptance, that President Trump, that the political movement he represents is not ephemeral,” McKoon said. “It’s part of a historic realignment in American politics that’s going to affect this country for a long time to come.”
You can’t blame the Democrats of 2020 for thinking they’d never be back down this road. At the exact moment they met to cast their electoral votes for Biden then, a group of Republicans were meeting in an effort to cast an alternate slate of electoral votes for Trump. The events of that day eventually led to criminal indictments for several of those electors, as well as Trump himself.
Even when Trump announced he’d run again in 2024, the thinking among Democrats essentially amounted to, “How could we lose to this guy?” But voters around the country, including in Georgia, had other ideas.
The question everybody seems to be asking Georgia Democrats now is, “What happens next?” But the better question is, “Who happens next?” Because as their 2020 list of electors for Biden shows, a kind of generational change for Democrats is coming. Who emerges as a leader, and what that leader says to voters, will determine whether the state has a shot at regaining that blue hue, or if Republicans will dominate for another 20 years.
The first change coming seems to be for the Democratic Party itself. Williams, the leader of the state party then and now, appears to be on the way out after Ossoff texted her shortly after the election in November to say he no longer had confidence in her leadership.
Ossoff is the top Democrat up for election in 2026, so it’s not unexpected that he’d want a say in the party’s direction. Although that particular move wasn’t universally appreciated, it did reveal a long-unspoken worry among rank-and-file activists that a sitting member of Congress has less time than your average bear for the grassroots grind that Democrats will need to get their mojo back. The party is now in the process of changing its bylaws to make the chairperson role a full-time job, which by definition would make Williams ineligible.
Other Democratic leaders from 2020 are going or gone now, too. Abrams presided over the Biden count in 2020 and was credited nationally for his win in Georgia. But after losing her own 2022 rematch against Gov. Brian Kemp, Abrams has gone from being a driving force inside the state party to an occasional actor.
Some who voted for Biden that day, such as Athens-Clarke County District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez, have since been voted out of office, while a handful of party elders have stepped back on their own. Former state Rep. Calvin Smyre, the dean of the state House when Biden won, retired from the state House in 2022. Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, the first woman to be state Senate leader, and state Rep. Pedro Marin, the longest serving Latino member of the General Assembly, will both retire at the end of this year.
Ironically, if anything should give Democrats hope for the future, it may be Trump’s 2024 victory itself. Not only will Democrats have a Trump White House to run against in 2026, no recent turn of events in politics has shown quite so clearly that anything is possible, for anyone, at any time.
Nobody knows that better than a group of Republicans who lost in recent years, only to see their political careers revived with Trump’s. Former Sen. David Perdue, who lost that runoff to Ossoff in 2021, has been tapped as Trump’s ambassador to China. Likewise, Kelly Loeffler, former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and Herschel Walker, who all lost races to Warnock in the last two years, have been nominated by Trump for various roles in his administration, too.
Speaking of Warnock, it’s no small thing for Democrats to have two U.S. Senate seats, along with a few smaller wins to celebrate in 2024. But the senators will need a state party and strong candidates up and down the ticket to run and serve with them if they’re here for the long haul. It’s time for Democrats to start asking themselves who happens next.
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