Georgia Democrats swept statewide. The margins tell a more complicated story.

By now everyone is well aware that Georgia Democrats swept every statewide race Tuesday.

But they did not all win with the same Georgia coalition.

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff led the Democratic ticket with about 59% of the vote. Public Service Commissioner Peter Hubbard and Lt. Gov.-elect Josh McLaurin followed him among the party’s strongest performers.

Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms won comfortably with about 54.3% of the vote, but her share trailed most of the Democratic statewide ticket.

That variation is easy to miss in an election where the headline was simple: Democrats won everything.

Look more closely at the returns, though, and Tuesday’s sweep begins to look less like one Democratic wave washing evenly across Georgia and more like a collection of somewhat different coalitions that happened to produce the same partisan outcome.

The differences are particularly visible when comparing Ossoff and Bottoms.

In Forsyth County, Ossoff received about 44% of the vote while Bottoms received about 36%, a gap of nearly 8 percentage points. The difference was about 7 points in Oconee County and roughly 6 points in Cherokee and Cobb counties.

Even in heavily Democratic Fulton County, where Bottoms once served as mayor of Atlanta, Ossoff ran nearly 6 points ahead of the governor-elect.

In Clayton County, by contrast, the difference was less than 2 points.

The returns do not show how individual voters filled out their ballots, so they cannot prove that thousands of Georgians voted for Ossoff and then switched to Republican Rick Jackson for governor.

They do show that voters did not evaluate every Democrat the same way.

Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist who studies race and elections, said the starting point is the political environment itself.

“There’s a portion of the vote that could be explained by the wave,” Gillespie said.

Voters angry with Republicans may have decided to vote Democratic throughout much of the ballot, she said.

The variation between candidates requires looking at other factors. Incumbency is an obvious one.

Ossoff and Hubbard were incumbents.

Ossoff also had six years to build relationships with voters and local officials around the state. Republican officials publicly endorsed him during the campaign while supporting Republican candidates elsewhere on the ballot, often citing constituent service and federal funding he helped direct to their communities.

Gillespie said that may help explain some of Ossoff’s strength in traditionally Republican areas, particularly parts of Middle Georgia.

His opponent mattered, too.

Republican Mike Collins was running against an incumbent senator with an established statewide organization and a record voters had six years to evaluate. Bottoms, meanwhile, faced Jackson after spending years outside elected office and brought with her a record as Atlanta mayor that some voters already knew well.

Ossoff’s campaign declined to comment for this article.

Gillespie said that history may have mattered in places such as Buckhead, where voters who had concerns about Bottoms’ tenure as mayor could have been less willing to support her for governor.

“Each candidate sort of brought their own unique bundle of strengths and weaknesses to the table,” Gillespie said.

The differences extended beyond Ossoff and Bottoms.

McLaurin was not an incumbent in the office he sought, yet he finished among the strongest Democratic candidates statewide. That complicates any attempt to explain the rankings through incumbency alone.

It also means the Republican side of each matchup has to be considered.

Gillespie said voters may have viewed McLaurin’s Republican opponent, Greg Dolezal, differently from Republicans running for other offices. Candidate quality, campaign resources and the strength of the opposition can all produce differences even when voters broadly favor one party.

Then there is another pattern in the returns.

The three highest-performing Democrats statewide were white men. The remainder of the Democratic statewide slate consisted of Black women.

Bottoms, who will become Georgia’s next governor, finished near the bottom of the Democratic ticket by vote share despite defeating Jackson by a clear margin.

The pattern raises an obvious question: Did race or gender affect how some voters evaluated candidates?

Gillespie said there is not enough evidence yet to say.

“I’m not saying that it’s not,” she said. “I’m saying we need more data to know for sure.”

Election returns alone cannot isolate racial or gender bias from incumbency, candidate familiarity, campaign spending, geography, opponent strength or a candidate’s previous record in office.

Researchers would need more detailed precinct analysis or surveys that specifically measure racial attitudes and gender bias, Gillespie said.

The performance of the Black women on the ticket also varied, which makes a single explanation difficult.

“If you look at the other Black women on the ballot, not everybody is getting the identical votes,” Gillespie said.

Some candidates had previously held office. Others were seeking statewide office for the first time. Some faced well-known incumbents. Others ran against candidates who may have been more closely associated with President Donald Trump.

All of those differences matter.

So does when voters cast their ballots.

Ossoff narrowly won among voters who cast ballots on Election Day statewide, receiving about 51% of those votes.

Bottoms received about 45% of the Election Day vote and lost that group to Jackson.

Both Democrats performed substantially better with advance voters and voters who cast absentee ballots by mail.

Again, that does not prove the same Election Day voters backed Ossoff and Jackson. But it reinforces the broader pattern: Ossoff performed better in parts of the electorate where Bottoms had more difficulty.

Ossoff’s campaign spent much of the election emphasizing the senator’s constituent service, his relationships with local officials across party lines and his ability to appeal to independents and Republicans without softening his criticism of the Trump administration.

Bottoms’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The biggest lesson from Tuesday may ultimately be that both things can be true at once.

Georgia experienced a Democratic wave strong enough to elect every statewide candidate the party nominated.

But underneath that wave were meaningful differences.

Incumbency helped some candidates. Opponents mattered. Geography mattered. Previous records mattered. Campaign resources and organization mattered.

Race and gender may have mattered, too, but the returns cannot establish how much.

Democrats swept Georgia with the same party label.

The numbers suggest they did not necessarily do it with the same voters.

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