Politics of Georgia (U.S. state)

The politics of Georgia change frequently and often follow the rest of the United States in major historical landmarks. The state has a long history, starting in the 18th century as a British colony. The cultural makeup of the early colony led to a ban on slavery being overturned soon after its implementation, setting the stage for the many plantations in the state. Rival governments were formed during the Revolutionary War, with the Patriot government surviving and forming a unified state government after the war. Georgian politics then followed the Democratic-Republican Party before the American Civil War and the Democrats afterward. In fact, the state never voted Republican until 1964, making it the last continental state to do so. Since then, Democrats have won the state just four times, for native son Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992, and for Joe Biden in 2020.

As the political ideologies of the Democratic and Republican parties shifted in the 20th century, Georgia politicians moved to the Republican Party. Republicans won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in history in 1980. Then, Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor in the state since 1872 upon his election in 2002. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Georgia became a competitive swing state,^[2] with Democrats narrowly winning all statewide federal elections in the 2020 elections, establishing the state as a battleground on the federal level.^[3][4] However, the state of Georgia does currently continue to maintain a Republican lean on the state level and federal, with Republicans controlling every statewide office, having Republican majorities in the State House and Senate, as well as a complete Republican pick on the Georgia Supreme Court. Though losing the US Senate race in 2022, statewide Republicans vastly improved their margins of victory from 2018 to 2022 in Georgia. In 2024, Donald Trump flipped Georgia back into the Republican column winning it by 2.2%.