Why did Democrats hold on to power in Georgia longer than any in other Southern state? That owed in part to the distinctive structure of the state’s politics. Georgia has almost 160 counties, second in number only to the state of Texas. The story goes that the legislature carved out small counties so that a farmer in a mule-drawn wagon could make it to the courthouse and back in a single day. The real consequence was that under Georgia’s county-unit system, the more rural counties there were, the more leverage they would have against urban interests in Atlanta. All Democrats who controlled their local fiefs for much of the 20th century had little reason to switch to the Republican Party.
Until, that is, the 1990s, when culture war issues — abortion, guns and gay rights — transformed political loyalties in rural Georgia. The field general of the conservative culture wars of the 1990s was a Georgia Republican, Representative Newt Gingrich, who played a singular role in bringing forth the scorched-earth tactics of the modern Republican Party.
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Mr. Gingrich told the Georgia College Republicans in 1978 during his third, and ultimately successful, race for Congress. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics.”
What Mr. Gingrich pioneered in culture-war politics Mr. Trump has escalated. Two days after Election Day, Donald Trump Jr. was in Georgia at a rally outside Republican Party campaign headquarters, castigating Republicans who did not defend his father’s specious claims of fraud. Sounding a lot like Mr. Gingrich in 1978, Mr. Trump Jr. speculated that Democrats had gotten used to “a Republican Party that hasn’t had a backbone.”
“That party is gone,” he said, “and anyone that doesn’t fight like that should go with it.”
The problem for Republicans is that when they “fight like that,” as Mr. Trump Jr. put it, they sometimes lose voters — like suburban women. Those voters played a big role in Democrats’ success in the 2018 midterm elections and were key to Mr. Biden’s victory. The weight of Georgia’s rural population is no longer sufficient to balance the state’s surging urban and suburban populations, particularly in Atlanta, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. On Nov. 3, Mr. Biden racked up staggering margins in the state’s urban counties — Fulton and DeKalb (include parts of Atlanta) and Chatham (includes Savannah). To repeat Mr. Biden’s feat, Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock will need to do the same.