I have covered enough elections in Georgia to know that, apparently, they are all historic.
Every cycle, we hear about historic turnout, historic candidates, historic stakes and historic consequences.
Sometimes that is true.
Georgia has seen plenty of history in recent years. The state voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time in nearly three decades. Voters elected the state’s first Black U.S. senator and it’s first Jewish U.S. senator. Suburban counties that once reliably backed Republicans have become much more competitive.
Those things matter.
But as Georgia heads into another Election Day, I have been thinking about how quickly we reach for the word “historic” — and how often we are still arguing about the same things.
Georgia is still arguing over the state’s role in making health care affordable and accessible.
We are still arguing over voting laws and how elections should be run.
We are still arguing over taxes, education, public safety and how much responsibility state government has to solve the problems people encounter in their daily lives.
And, as always, we are arguing about who has political power in a state that is changing faster in some places than in others.
The names change. The campaign signs change. The television ads definitely change.
The tensions are much more familiar.
Metro Atlanta continues to grow. The suburbs continue to become more diverse. Fast-growing counties farther outside Atlanta are changing, too. Rural Georgia continues to lose population while maintaining an outsized role in state politics. Black voters remain central to Democratic success. Latino and Asian populations continue to grow.
None of those changes happened during a single election cycle.
They have been building for years.
That is why I sometimes bristle when one election result is treated as proof that Georgia has suddenly become a completely different place.
Georgia did not become a blue state when Joe Biden narrowly won here in 2020.
It did not suddenly become a red state again when Republicans won every statewide constitutional office two years later.
The state is more complicated than that.
Cobb County can tell us one thing about Georgia. Forsyth County can tell us something completely different. So can Dougherty County, Whitfield County or a county on the Georgia coast.
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Even voters living a few miles apart can experience the state very differently.
That is part of what makes covering Georgia politics interesting.
It also makes election-night declarations dangerous.
We like elections because they give us a result. Someone wins. Someone loses. There is a percentage next to each candidate’s name, and eventually somebody calls the race.
Government is rarely that neat.
After Election Day, whoever wins will have to deal with the same problems Georgians were talking about long before the first campaign ad aired.
Health insurance will still be expensive.
Some communities will still struggle to find doctors.
Teachers will still go to work in schools that need more resources.
People will still complain about property taxes, traffic, housing costs and potholes.
And lawmakers will return to the Capitol in January to debate many of the same questions they debated last year.
That does not mean elections are unimportant.
Quite the opposite.
Elections determine who gets to make those decisions.
But every election does not need to be described as a “political earthquake” for it to matter.
On Tuesday, I will be watching the results closely. I will be looking at turnout, margins and the places where Georgia appears to be changing.
I will also be trying not to declare that the state has transformed overnight.
Maybe Tuesday will be historic.
Or maybe it will be another chapter in a political story Georgia has been writing for a very long time.
Either way, that is worth paying attention to.
Maya T. Prabhu is the editorial director of PeachPol.
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