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Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes make it one of the most crucial swing states this fall.
For decades, Georgia was reliably Republican, except for a few races when Southern Democrats (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) were on the ticket. But in recent years, the state has grown bluer, thanks to population increases in the Atlanta metro area, and some disaffected Republicans in suburban areas voting against former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden won the state by two-tenths of a percentage point (11,779 votes), one of the narrowest margins of victory in the country that year.
Georgia was at the center of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results in 2020. In January 2021, Trump pressured Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to reverse the state’s already certified election results in an hour-long phone call that’s at the center of the criminal cases against him. During the call, Trump told Raffensperger, “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.”