Introduction

Throughout this year’s presidential election, I chose to focus on the campaigns running in Georgia. I’m a ride-or-die Californian, but in 2021 during the Senate run-off election, I traveled to Georgia and canvassed for Warnock and Ossoff. It was a historic win¹! We celebrated! I went to the Atlanta Aquarium! I was chased off people’s lawns!

Most importantly, however, it was the first time that I was exposed to a place where politics was contentious. Red and blue lawn signs lined the streets and I talked to many Democrat women whose husbands voted for Trump. This sparked my interest in understanding Georgia this election, where it is STILL very much a swing state.

I Get My Peaches Down In Georgia…

Georgia borders the Atlantic Ocean, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. I would say it is solidly a “Southern” state. It sends two members to the US Senate and 14 to the House of Representatives. Within the state, there are 180 members in their House of Representatives and 56 members in their Senate².

Georgia sports a population of 10,725,274 people and is the 21st largest state by area³. The median household income is $75,000 and 35.4% of Georgia residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The population itself is mostly Black and African American, with Hispanic/Latino people being the second largest ethnic group. Over time, there’s been a large influx of African American, Asian American, and Latinos into Georgia⁴, which has impacted voting.

Georgia was reliably Republican from 1972 to 2016 and Biden was the first time that a Democratic presidential candidate has won Georgia’s votes since Clinton in 1992⁵. Harris had big shoes to fill!

This year, Trump took Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes with 50.7% of the popular vote share⁶. Interestingly, Georgia’s largest county – Fulton County – went to Harris ALTHOUGH it did swing 1.5 points to the right since 2020⁷. This is a pattern that was repeated across Gwinnett County (where I once canvased, oh so many years ago), DeKalb County, and many others; Harris may have won those counties this election, but Georgia is trending towards the right with the rest of the nation.

Down-Ballot Candidates

Not all is lost, however– there were three down-ballot candidates this election that were of special interest⁸. The first was the Georgia House District 42 race between 27-year-old Democratic Socialist Gabriel Sanchez and Republican Diane Jackson. Sanchez won narrowly and became the first Democratic Socialist to win a state primary in Georgia.

Secondly, the Georgia Senate District 48 race between incumbent Republican Shawn Still and Democrat Ashwin Ramaswami was a victory for the Democratic party. Ramaswami won with 52.45% of the vote and became the first Indian American and first Gen-Z lawmaker in the Georgia Senate.

Finally, the Georgia House District 53 race ended with a victory of incumbent Republican Deborah Silcox and a loss for Democrat Susie Greenberg. However, it is notable that Silcox nabbed a quite narrow victory given her incumbency.

Forecasted Outcomes

Next, let’s discuss the various forecasts that were made before the results of our election. Firstly, I want to address the elephant in the room… Yes, I made a model… Yes, I was pretty damn accurate… Yes, I want props! I predicted that Trump would take Georgia with 50.83% of the popular vote and I was only off by 0.1%⁹! Feels so wrong to be so right about something kind of sad.

Let’s look at a few of the other forecasting models that were around this election. First, 538’s final forecast gave Trump a slight edge in Georgia, simulating 60 wins out of 100 for him. 538 used a combination of polls and fundamentals to create their model, which spit out a 50.6% popular vote share for Trump¹⁰.

Then, we have Nate Silver. He ascribed a small lead to Trump in Georgia as well¹¹, although I couldn’t figure out the exact number because of the paywall on his Substack.

Next, we have The Hill, which predicted that Donald Trump had a 63% chance of winning Georgia¹².

Finally, Sabato’s Crystal Ball noted as well that Georgia leans Trump¹³.

It’s actually quite confusing to me that the media didn’t report on Georgia leaning towards Trump more often. Most of the major forecasting models were predicting that Trump would take the swing state. However, the majority of headlines I culled from the news were incredibly bullish in favor of Harris, including a few that reported that her staff were feeling optimistic going into the election. I wonder if this had an impact on getting out the vote– if voters felt that Harris was going to win Georgia, they’d be less inclined to actually vote on Election Day. Conversely, Trump’s messaging around Georgia still very much being a battleground may have positively impacted the number of voters that came out in support of his campaign.

Ground And Ad Game

As of August 3, Harris had 24 offices in Georgia¹⁴ and in July 12, NPR reported that Trump had opened 12 offices¹⁵. By October 31, Harris had 40,000 volunteers, 220 staff members, and 32 field offices in the state. Trump, by contrast, had 25,000 volunteers¹⁶.

By August 23, Trump had spent around 40 million dollars in Georgia and Harris had spent 47 million on ads in Georgia¹⁷. There was significantly more money being spent in Georgia than in other battleground states. For example, only 9.9 million was spent by the Trump campaign in Arizona. Harris outspent Trump on ads (in total) by 460 million¹⁸. In terms of ad strategy, Harris mirrored Clinton’s blanket statement strategy by pushing the same issues in each state, while Trump targeted each state with different hot-buttons¹⁹. For Georgia in specific, Harris had around 84.6k airings of ads on taxation, healthcare, and abortion, while Trump had 86.5k on immigration, inflation, and the economy.

Discussion

It’s logical to assume that the more money is sunk into a campaign, the better the results. This should have indicated a Harris victory in Georgia. However, maybe Harris was already at such a disadvantage that she should have overcompensated even more than she did.

Huber and Arceneaux argue that campaign ads persuade voters to vote for their candidate and can manipulate voters’ expressed candidate preferences²⁰. Essentially, they argue the same thing– the more money a candidate can spend on ads, the more powerful their campaign.

Gerber and co argue the same thing²¹. Their findings that TV ads have strong but short-lived effects on voting preferences indicate that the best campaigns have consistent streams of money flowing into ads. Big campaigns are still paid media battles that “aim to persuade voters.”

Finally, it would be remiss not to discuss Vavreck’s lengthy research on campaign narratives and messaging²². Vavreck mentions that “[i]n the contest over influencing voters between the media content and the candidate discourse, there is reason to believe that the candidate-sponsored content will win.” (66) Again, this means that isolating the impact of the media, ads were one of the biggest factors in this election.

Vavreck also created a campaign typology that discusses different strategies for campaigns. Based on her theory, Democrats in 2024 should have run an insurgent campaign, choosing an issue where they benefit from public opinion more than the opponent. Republicans should’ve run a clarifying campaign, where they talk about the economy more than anything to reduce voters’ uncertainty. Unfortunately, this strategy worked immensely well for Trump and not so well for Harris. Harris chose abortion as an issue to center her campaign around in Georgia (as well as elsewhere), but ultimately Georgians seem to have been more worried about their economy, not their reproductive rights.

Credits

Heartfelt thanks to Professor Enos, Matthew Dardet (goated teaching fellow), Ethan Jasny and Yusuf Mian.