The state that's given Trump the most fits threatens to bite him all over again

If Donald Trump is going to romp to the 2024 GOP presidential nomination — and stay out of prison — he’ll need to break his Georgia losing streak.

That's not just in the case of a criminal trial stemming from his indictment over allegedly trying to steal the 2020 election, but in the state's potentially pivotal Republican presidential primary next March.

Georgia isn't going to singlehandedly determine the GOP nomination. But if Trump emerges from the four early states and Super Tuesday in a competitive race, voters in Georgia could play a key role in the trajectory of the primary.

And if history and polling are any indication, it's one of Trump's rivals who could benefit.

Since he became president in 2017, no state has underscored the former president's political struggles like Georgia. It’s a traditionally red state with vast suburbs that have turned against the Trump-era GOP. Not only did he become the first Republican to lose the state's electoral votes since 1992, Democrats also flipped two Senate seats — giving them control of the chamber — and two House seats.

But Georgia went even further last year. Republican primary voters soundly rejected Trump's efforts to unseat Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who had pushed back against Trump’s insistence that the state’s vote had been stolen from him (there is no such proof). Kemp cruised to victory in the general election while Trump's handpicked Senate candidate, Herschel Walker, fell flat.

In two polls conducted among Republican voters in Georgia this spring, Trump still led Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. But his advantage — 8 points in one poll, 21 in another — was significantly smaller than in national surveys, suggesting the primary electorate there may be more open to a Trump alternative.

Georgia’s place on the primary calendar makes it influential: The state is expected to hold its primary on March 12, one week after Super Tuesday — and one week before the potentially winner-take-all contests in larger states like Florida, Illinois and Ohio.

If Trump comes out of Super Tuesday without clearly dominating the race, Georgia could be a huge battleground, even though the state will award its delegates proportionately. Whoever is in a position to challenge Trump when Georgia rolls around will likely push heavily there in an effort to build momentum. That’s especially true given Trump's rocky record in the state and its shared border with Florida, which both DeSantis and Trump call home.

Trump won Georgia in 2016, when the state was part of the March 1 Super Tuesday bonanza. And his vote share there, 38.8 percent, was slightly smaller, though mostly similar to neighboring states that voted on the same day: Alabama (44.6 percent) and Tennessee (38.9 percent).

Trump carried Georgia in the 2016 general election by 5.2 percentage points — down slightly from Mitt Romney’s 7.8-point victory in 2012, though the state was not part of the general election battlefield contested by both Trump and Hillary Clinton.

But since then, the state has drifted to the left and Republican voters have become more skeptical of Trump and his influence. Much of the change has been driven by the vast population growth in and around Atlanta, the state capital and site of Trump’s most recent indictment.

Democrats flipped two Atlanta-area congressional districts in 2018 and 2020, respectively, even though Republican incumbents had carried both districts with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2016.

Where things really went wrong for Trump was in 2020, when he spent the two months after the election spreading conspiracies about his defeat and trying to overturn it. That effort culminated in a 24-hour stretch beginning on Jan. 5, 2021, when two Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, were ousted in twin runoff elections that erased the GOP’s majority in the chamber. The next day, Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.

Trump was the first Republican since then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992 not to carry Georgia in a general election. And thanks to his criticism of Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Georgia became — more than any other state — engulfed in a debate over how influential Trump should be in the GOP’s future.

Trump targeted both Kemp and Raffensperger for defeat in the May 2022 primary — and failed to oust either incumbent.

Kemp won in a walk, beating Perdue, the former senator, with 73.7 percent of the vote. The governor ran strongest in and around Atlanta, breaking 80 percent in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, along with the populous close-in suburbs of Cobb and DeKalb counties.

While Cobb and DeKalb are both counties that contain Atlanta suburbs, they have historically voted differently thanks to demographics. DeKalb is majority-Black and has long been dominated by Democrats.

Cobb, north and west of Atlanta, has been historically Republican: Romney won it with 55.4 percent of the vote in 2012.

But since then, Republicans have been in freefall in Cobb: Trump captured only 46.7 percent of the vote there in 2016, then dropped further to 42 percent in 2020. Walker, in losing the Dec. 2022 runoff to Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, won only 40.4 percent.

It’s a place that could be the epicenter of any credible challenge to Trump in the spring GOP primary. Trump lost only four counties in Georgia during the 2016 primary, and Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb were three of them. (Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida carried those three, along with Clarke County, home to the college town of Athens.)

There is one other way in which Georgia could prove challenging for Trump. Despite his hold on the national GOP, party leaders in the state have proven unafraid of challenging the former president. Kemp on Tuesday directly refuted Trump’s continued assertions that the 2020 election was stolen.

“For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor.”