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WASHINGTON: A very narrow margin and an ongoing vote count are making the Georgia contest between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden too early to convene.
Votes are still being counted across the state, though many of the counties where Biden was leading.
Biden topped the incumbent in the tally on Friday (Nov. 6) morning, leading by fewer than 1,600 votes out of nearly 5 million ballots cast, an advantage of about 0.03 percentage points. Under Georgia state law, a candidate may request a recount if the margin is within 0.5 percentage points.
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THE DETAILS
The Georgia Secretary of State’s office said Friday morning that fewer than 8,200 missing ballots remained to be counted and 8,900 ballots mailed to military and overseas voters had yet to be returned. They must be received by 5pm on Friday to be counted.
Gabriel Sterling, an official in the secretary of state’s office, said a recount is “more than likely, and people will see that the result will remain essentially the same.”
The AP election investigation found that there have been at least 31 recounts across the state since 2000. Three of them changed the outcome of the elections. The initial margins in those races were 137 votes, 215 votes and 261 votes.
Among the 31 counts, the largest change in results was 0.1% in the 2006 race for the position of Vermont Auditor. This was a low turnout election in which the initial results had one candidate winning by 137 votes. The candidate ultimately lost by 102 votes, for a swing of 239 votes.
Trump and Biden were locked in a tight race Friday to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Georgia is a must-win state for Trump, who has a narrower path to victory than Biden. Trump prematurely declared that he was winning it early Wednesday morning.
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POLITICAL PROFILE OF GEORGIA
Georgia has long been a Republican stronghold. Voters there have not favored a Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton in 1992. Trump beat Hillary Clinton there by 5 percentage points in 2016. And the state government is dominated by the Republican Party.
But control of the party has been loosened. As older, white, and Republican-leaning voters die, they are being replaced by a cast of younger and more racially diverse people, many of whom moved to the booming area of Atlanta from other states, and took your politics with them.
Overall, demographic trends show that the state’s electorate is getting younger and more diverse each year. Like other metropolitan areas, Atlanta’s suburbs have also turned away from Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton switched Cobb and Gwinnett counties, where Biden currently leads.
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In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams galvanized black voters in her bid to become the country’s first African-American woman to lead a state, a campaign she narrowly lost.
Many political analysts say it is not a question of whether, but when Georgia becomes an indecisive state. That became clear in the final weeks of the campaign as Biden; his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris; and former President Barack Obama swept the state. Trump also visited the state to play defense.
