For the second time in as many statewide elections, Georgia voters contributed to a comeback. Beyond that headline, the similarities between Brian Kemp’s re-election in 2022 and Donald Trump’s restoration in 2024 begin to fade.
Trump authored one of the most stunning political redemption stories in American history. Not only is he just the second person to win non-consecutive terms in the White House, but he did so after being presumed politically dead as of Jan. 7, 2021, and facing multiple criminal prosecutions since then. Declaring victory early Wednesday, Trump hailed “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.”
For once, he wasn’t exaggerating.
By comparison, Kemp’s re-election in 2022 was far more conventional. But he, too, looked like a political goner in January 2021, having defied Trump’s calls to intervene in the 2020 contest and watched as both of Georgia’s seats in the U.S. Senate flipped to Democratic hands. While his performance during the COVID-19 pandemic won him more confidence from voters than many understood at that time, the controversial elections reform bill he signed just weeks later helped rally Republicans around him. (That bill, by the way, has resulted only in smooth elections and large turnout – a far cry from what its detractors claimed.)
What is interesting is how differently the two men won their second terms.
Both squeezed even more votes out of their rural support bases. But Kemp in 2022 performed much more strongly in Georgia’s most-populous counties.
Kemp’s margin of victory over Stacey Abrams was more than 243,000 votes larger in 2022 than in 2018, when he narrowly escaped a runoff. About half of that additional margin, more than 122,000 new net votes, came from Georgia’s 10 largest counties by population — even though only about a third of Kemp’s total votes came from those counties. So, his greatest improvement didn’t necessarily come from where he was already strongest.
It didn’t stop there. Kemp not only improved his margin in nine of Georgia’s 10 most-populous counties, but in 18 of the top 20. Percentage-wise, Kemp’s biggest gains came in more rural counties such as Seminole, Hancock, Quitman and Clay.
But it is fair to say that he balanced cutting his deficit in large counties with running up the score in smaller ones.
That last bit might sound like what Trump did nationwide this year. He captured the popular vote by performing even more strongly in red states like Florida and Texas while also trimming his losses in blue states like New York and Illinois.
Still, this is an example of how Georgia zigged as the rest of the nation zagged – and how Trump’s comeback in Georgia differed from Kemp’s.
Whereas Kemp got half of his increased margin from the state’s 10 most-populous counties, they delivered less than one-fifth of Trump’s net vote gain of 129,855 (pending the final vote certification).
Whereas Kemp gained ground in nine of those 10 counties, Trump improved in only seven of them.
Instead, Trump’s vote gains were more evenly distributed. He depended more heavily than Kemp on counties like Carroll, Lowndes, Bartow and Jackson – top-30 counties for population that were in his top 10 for improved margin. Trump found success in Georgia less by closing the gap where he lost before, and more by energizing even more voters where he won before.
Looking at percentages, Trump’s biggest gains were also in rural counties. But what’s striking about his list is that – this time echoing national trends – he found significant gains in majority-minority counties. In fact, the five counties where Trump most improved his percentage of the vote (as opposed to raw totals) were rural counties where white Georgians don’t make up a majority of residents.
Most of us look at all this and simply conclude there’s more than one way to skin a cat. But you can bet that politicos will study the differences, however nuanced, in these two paths between now and 2026.