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News outlets have called Georgia for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, giving him the state’s 16 electoral votes.
For a generation, the state has been part of a solid Republican South. Like much of the rest of the country, its racial demographics have diversified in recent years. Democrats had been hoping the state’s long-resident (and long-disenfranchised) African-American population — as well as its Latino and Asian newcomers — would help put it over the top. But it didn’t, and the state went as it always does.
When the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump, and Georgia started looking a little bit like a swing state. But Trump won in the same way he did in the rest of the South and the Midwest — by getting white voters to the polls.
More than 40 percent of Georgia’s voting population is nonwhite or Hispanic, so on paper it should be possible for Democrats to make a strong showing there. But Republicans have managed to dominate the state thanks to overwhelming support among white voters plus relatively low registration and turnout among black men and the state’s growing Hispanic and Asian population.
Republicans likely would have carried Georgia even without their voter restriction efforts — Clinton only overtook Trump in the polls for a few days in August, and by the campaign’s final month Trump enjoyed a consistent lead of at least a few points.
It was enough to put him over the top.
