Before 2020, who would have considered Georgia the crucial state for the Democratic Party? The state had not gone for a single Democrat in a presidential election in 30 years. Moreover, both U.S. Senate seats and the governor’s office had been controlled by Republicans for 20 years. Yet less than two weeks ago, as Georgians reelected Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock to the Senate, they capped off a raucous two-year stretch for Dems in the peach state that saw Georgia put Joe Biden in the White House, resist Trump’s efforts to overturn those results, and enable Democrats to take control of the Senate and then hold it with a one seat margin. The political landscape would be far different for Democrats right now were it not for Georgia.
In the next few months, Democrats will turn the page to 2024 and choose where to have their presidential nominating convention. They should acknowledge just how pivotal Georgia has become in the last two elections and choose Atlanta, which is reportedly one of the finalists, along with Chicago and New York. In doing so, they might highlight the changing demographics across the American South that are suddenly putting not just Georgia, but other states in the region in play for the party. As Democrats have lost ground in Midwestern states like Ohio, they need to make it up in other areas to stay competitive in the future. The results in Georgia speak for themselves, why not the South?
In 2020, as Democrats Jon Ossoff and Warnock prepared for runoff elections against Georgia’s two sitting Republican U.S. Senators, each of their campaigns could have tried to capitalize on the somber mood in the country due to the pandemic and gone negative. Instead, both campaigns surveyed the state and decided they believed Georgians would turn out and vote for them if they ran positive campaigns that focused on reaching a broad coalition of young and minority voters, especially Blacks, with strong voter contact programs.
They recruited more than 40,000 volunteers to help with this effort, and those volunteers knocked on a million doors in just the last four days of the runoff campaign. The Democrats’ optimism about the state’s electorate paid off. Approximately 225,000 new voters who did not vote in the November election went to the polls for the runoff, a disproportionate number of whom were Black. It put both Ossoff and Warnock over the top and gave Democrats the majority in the Senate.
This flexing of strength by minorities at the ballot box in Georgia coincided with an increase in the percentage of the state’s Black population, from 31.5 percent in 2010 to 33 percent in 2020. In the same period, the percentage of Georgians who are white went down from 59.7 percent to 51.9 percent. This is a trend across the South, with the percentage of Blacks and other minority groups with whom Democrats do well increasing in the region. For instance, since 2010, of 65 counties across the country that became majority-minority, more than two thirds of those counties are in the South.
Atlanta is a city that is best known for optimism, inclusion, equity, social justice, and civil rights.
These are the same core values the Democratic Party needs to extol if it wants to continue to enjoy support from the growing minority population across the country.
Moreover, hosting the Democrats in Atlanta would require a regional effort that would likely draw support from progressive leaders from other southern states who are looking at what Georgia has achieved at the polls and are seeking to emulate it.
While some pundits might argue there’s no correlation between a convention site and a party’s performance in that state in the ensuing election, holding the convention in Atlanta would have effects that reverberate far beyond Georgia’s borders. Selecting Atlanta would not only speak to the diverse coalition that continues to propel Democrats to victory, it would inspire Democrats in other competitive southern states to run, to organize, to fundraise, and to volunteer in what is now truly fertile Democratic territory.
Former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, who from 2018 to 2021 was Alabama’s first Democratic Senator in 20 years, told me, “For Democrats to continue to win national elections we need to expand our base of support among southern voters. Georgia has shown us the way. Given demographic changes, with a younger and more diverse population, holding the convention in the South, and particularly Atlanta, would demonstrate their commitment to planting the seeds for success.”
Political conventions are an old tradition — Democrats have held 49 of them to select their nominee for U.S. President, beginning in Baltimore in 1832. Since then, only four have been held below the Mason Dixon line. If Democratic Party leaders are attuned to recent trends, they’ll hold their 50th in Atlanta and highlight the diverse and hopeful electorate of Georgia that trusted them with the White House and the majority in the U.S. Senate.
David Tafuri served as the U.S. Department of State’s Rule of Law Coordinator for Iraq at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad during the height of the war in Iraq. He also was an outside foreign policy adviser to President Obama’s 2008 campaign. He currently is an international lawyer at ArentFox Schiff LLP in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta. Follow him on Twitter @DavidTafuri.