How Georgia counties shifted in the 2024 election

President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in Georgia played out as a political battle in each of Georgia’s 159 counties, with Trump winning all but 27 of them.

Not only did he win the majority of the statewide vote, in part by making gains in the populous metro Atlanta counties and flipping swing counties, he also succeeded in turning Republican-leaning areas a darker shade of red. Vice President Kamala Harris achieved similar gains in Democratic counties, but she did so in fewer counties and at a lower rate.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution did a deep dive into county-level results going back through the past five presidential elections to track how we got here. Here’s what we found.

Counties that got redder

Among 129 counties that were already leaning Republican in 2020, 117 moved farther toward the GOP this year — a nearly 2 percentage-point increase on average. But over the last five presidential elections, those 117 counties have shifted almost 7 percentage points to the right, on average.

During former President Barack Obama’s first run in 2008, Chattooga County — above Rome in the northwest corner of the state — went for his opponent, the late Republican Sen. John McCain, with 67% of the vote. In this most recent election, the county voted for Trump with 82% of the vote, giving it the largest Republican increase over the 16-year time period in the state.

In eight counties, Trump gained between 12 to 15 percentage points over McCain’s performance. What do those counties have in common? Each one increased its white voter population, and all but one saw its Black voter population decline.

The growth of the Republican vote in rural Georgia is most often seen alongside a decrease in minority voting strength, and not just in counties that went to Trump. For example, even though Hancock County voted for Harris by almost 68%, that’s down from 2008 when the county supported Obama by about 81%. Over that same period, the Black population has dropped by 20% and the white population has grown by 53%.

While these counties have shifted their Republican voting share the most since 2008, more populous counties are responsible for the largest increases in the raw number of Republican votes. The state’s big, urban counties typically support Democratic candidates, but because of their size and population growth, they account for a lot of Republican voters, too.

The county which has had the greatest increase in Republican voters since 2008 is Cherokee County with almost 42,000 more voters. While Cherokee continues to be a Republican county, its share of Democratic votes has grown from 24% in 2008 to 30% in 2024.