All eyes are on Georgia as election day approaches, which is an odd state of affairs for a state that was recently considered reliably red.
The cause of the shift was examined on Saturday in a Washington Post analysis by David Byler.
"According to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, Joe Biden leads President Trump by 1.6 points in the Peach State, while RealClearPolitics gives Biden a .8-point lead. Major handicappers rate both of the state’s Senate races as toss-ups. Both Trump and Biden are making late stops in Georgia, and both parties are blanketing the state with TV ads, a sign they agree the race there is tight," Byler noted.
"On the presidential level, Trump is a victim of the very realignment that won him the White House in the first place," he explained. "In the pre-Trump era, Republicans easily won Georgia by catering to White voters. In nearly every election, GOP candidates would win by landslide margins with non-college-educated White voters — many of whom are evangelical Christians — and take most of the college-educated White vote, while losing the overwhelming majority of Black voters. It was an ugly political equilibrium that played on the state’s historical racial divisions, but the net result was that Republicans routinely won statewide elections by safe, stable single-digit margins."
"But the firewall began to crumble as Trump alienated suburbanites — both through his incompetence and racist remarks," he explained. "No, White, college-educated suburbanites aren’t the GOP’s only problem this year. Biden seems to have gained a small foothold with blue-collar White voters; Trump has only slightly boosted his standing with Black voters; and Biden’s overall popularity with swing voters is probably helping him. But above all, Trump is seeing the downside of the trade he made in 2016: He won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan by swapping blue-collar Whites for suburbanites, but it has cost him — and the rest of the GOP — strength in urbanized Sun Belt states such as Georgia."
