Republican Donald Trump has won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes after narrowly losing the Peach State to President Biden in 2020.
Trump beats Vice President Kamala Harris in the state 50.9% to 48.4%, with 94% of votes counted, the Associated Press reports.
Trump’s comeback in Georgia follows his razor-thin loss in 2020, when he fell short of taking the state by just under 12,000 votes — or 0.23 points. Prior to 2020, Georgia hadn’t handed its electoral votes to a Democrat since Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996.
The former president held a late-night rally in Macon Sunday in the seventh-inning stretch of his presidential campaign, echoing his election promises to mend an America overwhelmed with illegal immigration and crime.
“The day I take the Oath of Office, the migrant invasion ends and the restoration of our country begins immediately,” he promised attendees, telling them to get out to the polls and vote.
“We’re gonna close this thing out, and it’s party time,” Trump told Georgians.
In the 2024 presidential election, Georgia saw significant activity at the polls Tuesday after unprecedented early voting in the state, which some election officials predicted would turn precincts into ghost towns compared to typical Election Day activity.
Georgia’s early voting period ended on Friday, Nov. 1, with more than 4 million votes cast at the close of the polls.
That figure includes 3.7 million ballots cast early in person and more than 242,000 absentees by mail.
This cycle’s early voting period in the Peach State saw a record-breaking turnout, with 55% of ballots cast before Election Day.
This cycle’s early vote turnout is about 80% of the state’s total turnout in the 2020 presidential contest when just under 5 million Georgians voted.
The 3.7 million-plus early in-person ballots cast also dwarfed the state’s early in-person voting total in 2020, which yielded roughly 2.7 million votes.
Notably, Georgia saw a record number of black voters cast ballots during the early voting period — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported last week that as of Wednesday, nearly 873,000 black Georgians had already voted.
The lion’s share of Georgia’s votes come from metro Atlanta counties where the majority of voters reside: Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties.
Last week, Georgia election officials began urging voters to put absentee ballots in designated drop boxes rather than mail them via the US Postal service — for fear that they may not be received by the closing of the polls Tuesday.
The polls have been tight in Georgia throughout the three-month election season since Vice President Harris entered the race, with both the FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics averages consistently giving Trump a narrow advantage — save the first week of September when Harris was surging in the polls.
October polling showed varying degrees of an advantage for the former president.
One comprehensive YouGov poll surveyed 2,663 likely voters from Oct. 1 to Oct. 25, finding Trump 5 points ahead with 51% support to Harris’ 46%.
A Marist College poll of 1,193 likely voters from Oct. 17 to Oct. 22 found the two candidates dead even at 49%, but another survey of registered voters conducted in the same period gave Harris a one-point edge over Trump.
An AtlasIntel survey of 1,429 likely Georgia voters conducted Oct. 25 to Oct. 29 found Trump 3 points ahead of Harris, 50% to 47%.
The race in Georgia tightened after Biden dropped out of the race in July, narrowing Trump’s advantage over the Democratic ticket from the 4 to 7-point range down to the 0 to 3-point range.
Trump’s victory lap in Georgia comes on the heels of the ex-prez making peace with Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican he’d been at odds with over Biden’s 2020 election victory in the state, which the former president adamantly disputed.
Kemp’s refusal to call a special legislative session to overturn the state’s election results sparked Trump’s ire.
The 2020 election results are at the root of the years-long feud between Trump and Georgia Republicans. Prior to that his Georgia performance was perfectly peachy, beating Hillary Clinton by a 5-point margin in the swing state in 2016.
But his re-election bid in 2020 — and high profile denial of the results — arguably cost Republicans the Senate majority, when incumbent GOP Georgia Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler both lost their seats in a January 2021 runoff election to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock respectively.
In Georgia, if neither candidate captures 50% of the vote in a general election contest, the race will be decided in a runoff between the top two vote-getters. That was the case for both Senate races in 2020, prompting a runoff that dragged out the election season by several months — and left the balance of power in the Senate in question.
Ultimately, those Georgia Republicans’ losses in 2021 flipped two previously solid red seats into Democratic hands, creating a 50-50 split in the upper chamber and a de-facto Democratic majority with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Senate tiebreaker.
The GOP suffered another loss in Georgia the following year, when Trump-endorsed Senate candidate and former football star Herschel Walker lost the Georgia runoff election to Warnock in December 2022.
Walker’s defeat delivered Warnock a full Senate term and helped Democrats clinch a 51-49 majority in the Senate — along with a pick-up in Pennsylvania, where now-Senator John Fetterman defeated celebrity TV doctor Mehmet Oz.
