Georgia’s political change came fast but has deep roots

Dana Evans at her family’s home in Henry County. Georgia’s election this year also marked the first time in any state since the Reconstruction era of the 1870s that “the majority of candidate’s coalition was Black voters, not white voters,” said Bernard Fraga, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. “We were praying that we got to 54%.” But while the change in the state’s politics bloomed faster than many expected, its roots are deep, growing out of a generation-long trend of migration back to the South — and to the Atlanta metropolitan region in particular — by hundreds of thousands of Black families. Although many political analysts thought North Carolina — a state that Barack Obama carried in 2008 — provided Democrats’ best shot at making a breakthrough in the Southeast, Georgia had “a little bit more of each of the components that make things favorable to Democrats,” said Tom Bonier, the head of TargetSmart: It had a larger share of Black voters, more college-educated white voters and a population that is more urban and, on average, younger. “I think people are begging for change and just think it’s time go in a fundamentally different direction.” To Shereda Jeffries, 42, an elementary school teacher who grew up in Savannah and moved to Henry County in June, Scandrett’s election came as a sign of people’s growing desire for new leadership after the nationwide protests this summer against racism and police brutality.