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(CNN) – Joe Biden wins in Georgia and Donald Trump wins in North Carolina, according to a CNN projection.
Biden’s victory adds 16 electoral votes to his tally, bringing him to 306, equaling President Donald Trump’s 2016 total. With CNN’s projection that Trump will win North Carolina, the final tally is 306-232.
In Georgia, Trump had reached an early lead in the count, but Biden got ahead as votes from Atlanta and its suburbs were counted.
The historic success of the Democratic nomination has been fueled by a grassroots rebirth that brought together a rapidly diversifying electorate and suburbs that both grow and become increasingly inhospitable to Republican candidates.
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Georgia Republicans have compounded the problem, as state lawmakers have so far refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare and Governor Brian Kemp, in 2019, signed a so-called “heartbeat bill,” one of the laws of most restrictive abortion in the country.
Biden’s success in a traditionally Republican state is the culmination of slow and steady advances by the party. Two years ago, Democrat Stacey Abrams fell very short on her run for governor, losing to Kemp by 1.4 percentage points. His campaign, and the work he’s done since, has focused on pulling out Democratic voters who had stayed at home in previous rounds. That set the stage for Biden, a moderate, to win big in the overlapping counties and outside of Atlanta, a city in the heart of the New South.
With the victory in Georgia, Biden hits the heart of what has been a Republican stronghold for presidential elections for nearly three decades. The former vice president is the first Democratic candidate to triumph in Georgia since Bill Clinton did in 1992.
