Former President Donald Trump captures Georgia’s 16 electoral votes

The result marks the end of a tumultuous campaign in Georgia, when both parties inundated the state with surrogates, door knocks, campaign rallies and television advertising.

Election Day went smoothly across the state, despite bomb threats being called into several polling locations in multiple counties. Most counties posted the bulk of early and absentee votes by 8 p.m. and Election Day votes followed later in the evening.

“Thank you to all the Georgians who did their duty to vote in the safest, most secure election in our nation’s history,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a press conference Tuesday night. “Millions of voters showed up to vote and you voted in record numbers.”

Over the last four years, Georgia has been the backdrop for some of the most pivotal moments shaping the trajectory of the nation — an upset 2020 victory for President Joe Biden in Georgia, an effort by Trump to overturn that result and his indictment here on multiple criminal charges.

And then there was the June 2024 debate in Atlanta between Biden and Trump, when Biden’s shaky performance alarmed so many Democrats it ultimately unraveled his reelection bid. With the race reset after Biden stepped aside, Harris chose Atlanta for her first full-scale rally as a newly-minted presidential candidate. Days later, Trump rallied supporters in the same Georgia State University arena. 

During the first half of 2024, Democrats began to fret about Biden’s sagging support, especially in Sun Belt states like Georgia, increasingly hinging their path to the White House on the Great Lakes states. Republicans felt buoyed by persistently high prices for staples like groceries and gas, ongoing wars abroad and Biden’s sometimes jumbled speech. In 2022, Georgia elected Republicans to every statewide office except for the U.S. Senate, where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock narrowly defeated Republican Herschel Walker in a runoff. 

But after Harris assumed the top of the ticket, Democrats experienced a burst of optimism that Harris would be able to summon voters of color and young voters in places in new battlegrounds like Georgia. 

In Georgia, Harris hammered Trump on his appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, allowing Georgia’s roughly six-week abortion ban to take effect. Harris emphasized this message during a last-minute stop in Cobb County after ProPublica reported on the deaths of two Black women in Georgia which state investigators determined preventable and the result of Georgia’s restrictive abortion law.

Trump also struggled to hang onto independent-minded voters in the Atlanta suburbs, even haranguing Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, whose finely-tuned turnout operation and broad appeal has been seen as key to a Republican victory in Georgia. The two men have been locked in a long-running feud since 2020, when Kemp rebuffed Trump’s demands to help overturn his election loss. 

In a 2020 phone call, Trump unsuccessfully pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find him 11,780 votes,” one more than the margin separating him from Biden at the time. Trump remains under indictment in Georgia on racketeering and other charges, but the courts paused the case amid misconduct accusations against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. 

But by October, Kemp and Trump appeared together and shook hands after surveying hurricane damage near Augusta. The two never campaigned together, and Trump continued to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen, despite multiple recounts, audits and investigations proving it was not. 

But nonetheless, that rhetoric continued to fuel changes to Georgia election law. 2024 is the biggest test yet for the Election Integrity Act, or SB 202, an overhaul of voting law passed by Georgia Republicans in 2021. While the law expanded voting opportunities in some respects, it also capped the number of drop boxes and made it a crime to hand out food or water near the polls.

Republicans also continued to tinker with election law in every legislative session that followed, often citing their constituents’ persistent distrust in the integrity of elections.

This year, that distrust swept the previously little-known Georgia State Election Board, where newly-installed, more activist Republicans driven by false claims of widespread election fraud advanced a series of controversial changes, many opposed by local election officials, Brad Raffensperger and Republican Attorney General Chris Carr. 

Rules that seemingly allowed local election board members to vote against certifying results, despite state law declaring otherwise, and a rule mandating hand counts of the number of ballots cast on Election Day, alarmed election officials and voting rights activists. 

They feared these moves would open the door for allies of Trump to again call into question the results of the election – or at least cause confusion or disruption that could fuel misinformation.

This is a developing story and will be updated.