Donald Trump elected 47th president, captures Georgia’s 16 electoral votes

As of Wednesday morning, Trump led Harris in Georgia by more than 117,000 votes or more than two percent, though some absentee, provisional and overseas and military ballots remain outstanding.

While Harris improved on Biden’s 2020 margin in some metro Atlanta counties, like Douglas, Fayette, Henry and Rockdale, Trump improved his vote share slightly in Clayton, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett.

Harris won Cobb County by only a hair more than Biden did in 2020.

Nearly 5.3 million Georgians voted in the election, or roughly 63% of registered voters.

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 after ProPublica reported on the deaths of two Black women in Georgia that state investigators deemed preventable, which abortion rights supporters argued was the result of Georgia’s restrictive abortion law.

But Georgia exit polls suggest Trump likely improved his standing among women voters over 2020, and while predictions of large numbers of Black men turning to Trump in Georgia did not seem to materialize, Harris did not hit the Black turnout she needed to capture Georgia, especially in rural counties like in Southwest Georgia. 

Nationally, exit polls suggest Trump’s strength among younger men and Latinos also fueled his win.

Capitalizing on frustration with Biden’s presidency, Trump was able to stem further erosion of support in the battleground metro Atlanta suburbs, despite popular Gov. Brian Kemp keeping the former president at arm’s length. 

The two men had 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 also 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. 

In August, Trump bashed Kemp at a rally in Atlanta, calling him a “disloyal guy” and “a very average governor.” By October, they ultimately shook hands while surveying damage from Hurricane Helene. Kemp encouraged voters to elect Republicans up and down the ticket but did not campaign with the former president and focused his outreach on opposing Harris rather than boosting Trump. 

During the campaign, Trump continued to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen in Georgia despite multiple recounts, audits, and investigations proving it was not. 

That rhetoric continued to fuel changes to Georgia election law. 2024 was 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 prevented handing out food or water near the polls.

This year, distrust in election integrity swept over 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 and state election officials. Most of the rules were ultimately blocked by the courts for the 2024 election.

Election officials 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. 

In the hours after Trump’s victory, there was little discussion of election fraud as there was in 2020 when Biden won Georgia’s electoral votes.