Is Fayette a Democratic County Now?

Last May, I wrote that Republicans had lost the turnout battle in Fayette and that it was only going to get worse. More Fayette voters had pulled Democratic primary ballots than Republican ones, and I argued the county was on a fourteen-year path toward voting Democratic.

On Tuesday, that path reached a milestone.

Fayette County voted for the Democrat in all 11 statewide races on the ballot. Jon Ossoff carried the county by nearly 14 points, and Keisha Lance Bottoms carried it by more than 3. Democrats even beat four Republican incumbents in Fayette in the races for agriculture commissioner, insurance commissioner, school superintendent, and labor commissioner.

So it is fair to ask the question directly: Is Fayette a Democratic county now?

The answer is more complicated than Tuesday night’s headlines suggest. The complications matter for both parties, but they matter most for Republicans who need to understand exactly why they lost.

What Happened On Tuesday

According to the Fayette County Board of Elections’ election night summary report, 62,730 Fayette voters cast ballots with all 35 precincts reporting. That is 67% of the county’s 93,294 registered voters. The Citizen reported that Fayette may have posted the highest turnout of any county in Georgia.

Those 11 wins included the four races at the top of the ticket:

• U.S. Senate: Jon Ossoff 35,404 (56.8%), Mike Collins 26,814 (43.0%)
• Governor: Keisha Lance Bottoms 32,221 (51.6%), Rick Jackson 30,019 (48.1%)
• Lieutenant Governor: Josh McLaurin 33,178 (53.3%), Greg Dolezal 28,979 (46.6%)
• Secretary of State: Penny Brown Reynolds 33,122 (53.2%), Tim Fleming 29,114 (46.8%)

The more revealing numbers are each party’s raw vote totals compared with four years ago. In 2022, Brian Kemp won Fayette with 34,116 votes and Herschel Walker won it with 30,178. This year, Jackson received about 4,100 fewer Fayette votes than Kemp did. Collins received about 3,400 fewer than Walker.

Democrats moved in the opposite direction. Bottoms received about 6,500 more votes than Stacey Abrams did in 2022, and Ossoff received about 7,100 more than Raphael Warnock.

Total turnout grew by roughly 2,200 ballots compared with 2022, yet the Republican vote shrank by thousands. Democrats did not win Fayette only by bringing new people to the polls. Republicans also lost voters they had four years ago.

The Long Arc

To understand how unusual Tuesday was, it helps to remember where Fayette started. In 2012, Mitt Romney took 65% of the Fayette vote against Barack Obama. Fayette is also one of only eight Georgia counties that have not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Over the last eight years, the county’s margins have moved quickly, according to historical results and the county’s own reports:

• 2018 Governor: Kemp won Fayette by 13.4 points.
• 2020 President: Donald Trump won Fayette by 6.9 points.
• 2022 Governor: Kemp won Fayette by 13.9 points.
• 2022 U.S. Senate: Walker won Fayette by 3.2 points.
• December 2022 Senate runoff: Walker won Fayette by just 491 votes.
• 2024 President: Trump won Fayette by 3.2 points.
• 2026 Governor: Bottoms won Fayette by 3.5 points.
• 2026 U.S. Senate: Ossoff won Fayette by 13.8 points.

The governor’s race swung 17 points in four years. So did the Senate race.

Fayette has also become one of the best ticket-splitting counties in Georgia. In 2024, the Associated Press reported that Fayette ranked seventh among Georgia’s 159 counties in voters who backed Kemp but not Walker in 2022. That habit continued on Tuesday. Ossoff received about 3,200 more Fayette votes than Bottoms, and Jackson received about 3,200 more than Collins. Those gaps point to substantial ticket splitting between the Senate and governor’s races.

One more detail stands out. Collins received fewer Fayette votes than any other Republican on the statewide ballot, including candidates for labor commissioner and the Public Service Commission. Fayette voters did not punish every Republican equally.

Who Showed Up

In May, I argued that Fayette was changing because of who lives here. Fayette is younger, more diverse, and better educated than it was a decade ago. Tuesday’s electorate reflected that change.

Georgia Votes, which tracks early voting through state voter file data, found that White voters made up 52.8% of Fayette’s early vote this year. That figure was 58.8% at the same point in 2022 and 58.2% in 2024. Black voters rose from 27.7% of the early vote in 2022 to 30.8% this year.

The raw numbers are even more striking. Using those shares, I estimate that roughly 24,250 White voters cast early ballots in Fayette in 2022. This year, the figure was 24,307, which is essentially unchanged. Black early voters grew from roughly 11,400 to 14,156, an increase of about 24%. Hispanic, Asian, and other voters grew as well.

New voters mattered too. According to the same data, 9,232 of Fayette’s early voters, or one in five, did not vote in the 2022 general election. Some are new residents, some just turned 18, and some simply skipped the last midterm. Either way, they represent a pool of voters that neither party could count on four years ago.

The early electorate was also older and more female than many people assume. Voters 65 and older cast 40.7% of Fayette’s early ballots, and women cast 55.3%. Voters under 30 cast 10.3%, which is a larger share than they cast statewide.

These figures cover early voting only. Election Day voters leaned Republican, and the available data does not break them down by demographics.

The Honest Complication

Here is what Democrats may not want to hear. Fayette voted Democratic on Tuesday largely because Georgia voted Democratic.

Statewide, Bottoms won 54.3% to 45.7% and Ossoff won 59% to 41%. That means Fayette was still about 5 points more Republican than Georgia in the governor’s race and about 4 points more Republican in the Senate race.

That gap has a history. According to Georgia Votes, Fayette voted more Republican than Georgia in all nine statewide contests from 2018 through 2024. The gap shrank from 12 points in the 2018 governor’s race to just 1 point in the 2024 presidential race. Tuesday makes it 11 straight contests.

More importantly, the gap did not keep shrinking this year. In the 2022 midterm, Fayette ran about 6 points to the right of Georgia for governor and about 4 points to the right for Senate. This year, those gaps were about 5 and 4. Fayette’s lean compared with the rest of the state has barely moved since the last midterm.

That creates a puzzle. Fayette’s early electorate now looks increasingly similar to Georgia’s. Statewide, White voters made up 53.0% of the early vote and Black voters made up 32.8% as of late October. However, Fayette still voted several points more Republican than the state.

I don’t think the data fully explains why. One likely factor is the Election Day vote, which leaned heavily Republican in Fayette. Another may be Peachtree City and south Fayette, where older and wealthier voters appear to remain more Republican than similar voters in other parts of metro Atlanta. Precinct-level results, once the county posts them, should help answer that question.

In May, I projected that Fayette could vote for a Democratic presidential candidate as early as 2028 if the trend held. Tuesday is consistent with that projection. But it does not prove it because a wave this large would carry any county that still leans slightly Republican.

Two Fayettes, Again

In May, I wrote that Fayetteville and Peachtree City now have demographic profiles that look like two different states. Tuesday’s local results showed that split clearly.

While Democrats swept the statewide races in Fayette, Republicans won every contested local and legislative race on the county’s ballot. Most of them won comfortably.

• County Commission District 3: James Clifton beat Chandra Wright 58% to 42%.
• Board of Education District 2: Roy Rabold beat Ashley Smith 58% to 42%.
• State House District 73 (Fayette portion): Josh Bonner beat Tim Wilkinson 58% to 42%.
• State House District 82 (Fayette portion): Karen Mathiak beat Anthony Dickson 64% to 36%.
• State Senate District 16 (Fayette portion): Marty Harbin beat Sonya Wimberly Hawkins 55% to 45%.

Every Democrat who won a local or legislative race in Fayette ran unopposed. That list includes Commissioner Charles Rousseau, school board member Regina Daigre, and state legislators Debra Bazemore, Timoria McQueen Saba, and Kenya Wicks. Republicans did not field candidates in those races. Democrats, meanwhile, contested nearly every Republican seat and lost all of them.

The congressional race was the exception that proves how close things have become. In the Fayette portion of Georgia’s 3rd Congressional District, Brian Jack received 26,557 votes and Maura Keller received 26,426. That is a margin of 131 votes. In 2022, Drew Ferguson won the same part of Fayette by more than 11,000 votes. In 2024, Jack won it by 14 points. Jack still won the district comfortably because of the rest of the district, but Fayette came within a rounding error of rejecting him.

In May, I wrote that sustained Democratic investment could produce the first countywide Democratic win in a partisan office in a generation. In one sense, that happened 11 times on Tuesday. But Fayette’s local offices are elected by district, and in the districts that cover Peachtree City and south Fayette, Republicans still win by double digits.

So, Is Fayette A Democratic County Now?

Yes at the top of the ticket. No at the bottom.

Fayette’s voters have changed faster than Fayette’s politics. The county is now a true swing county that votes Democratic in statewide races when Georgia goes blue. It no longer gives Republicans a safe cushion, and in a close statewide race it could break either way.

But Fayette is not yet a county that votes to the left of Georgia, and its local offices still belong to Republicans. Peachtree City remains the anchor of that Republican bench while Fayetteville, Tyrone, and north Fayette drive the Democratic gains.

Other Atlanta suburbs have gone through this same in-between stage before becoming reliably Democratic. Fayette is in the middle of that transition, not at the end of it.

A Word To Local Republicans

Fayette tells us something bigger than what happened here. If voters were simply rejecting Republicans, local Republicans would have been swept away along with the statewide ticket. They were not. Local Republicans won comfortably while Congressman Brian Jack held on in Fayette by just 131 votes. That points to the larger story of Tuesday’s election. Republicans did not simply lose to Democrats. They lost under a national Republican brand increasingly defined by Donald Trump.

If you are a Republican, Tuesday night was probably painful to watch. But there was good news.

Midterm losses for the party in the White House are normal. Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63 House seats and their majority in 2010. In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Democrats gained 41 House seats. Political power in this country swings back and forth, and Republicans will be back.

Now the bad news.

This was not a normal midterm loss.

Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats, including seats in Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, and South Carolina. They also won in Kansas, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1932. In the House, Democrats are on track for their largest majority in nearly two decades, and they flipped districts that Trump carried by double digits just two years ago.

Here in Georgia, Democrats won every statewide office on the ballot. Bottoms became the first Democrat to win the governor’s race since Roy Barnes in 1998. She did it even though pro-Jackson groups spent or reserved nearly $76 million in general-election airtime compared with about $8 million for Bottoms and her allies.

You should be disappointed. But more than that, you should be angry because this was preventable.

This Loss Belongs To Donald Trump

The easy story is that Democrats won. The more accurate story is that this was mostly Donald Trump’s loss, and he took a lot of good Republicans down with him.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at what voters told pollsters, including the ones Republicans usually trust.

• Prices: Voters elected Trump in 2024 largely because they trusted him to bring down the cost of living. Instead, annual inflation rose to 3.7% in September, up from 3% when his second term began. In NBC’s exit poll, 75% of voters said the economy was in bad shape and 65% said Trump’s policies had made it worse. On the morning of the election, the president told Fox & Friends that inflation is “solved.”
• Tariffs: The Fox News Voter Poll found that about two-thirds of voters said Trump’s tariffs hurt the national economy. Nearly as many said the tariffs hurt the economy where they live. Only about two in 10 said tariffs helped.
• The Iran war: Trump ran as the candidate who would keep America out of new wars. Then he took us into one. In NBC’s exit poll, 62% of voters said starting the war was the wrong decision. Fox News found that the cost of gas and diesel topped voters’ worries, and that views on Iran were closely tied to fuel prices. In other words, voters felt the war every time they filled up their tanks.

Adding to this pain were the distractions. While families worried about gas and groceries, the president spent his spring on projects like repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue.” The Washington Times reported that the no-bid project’s cost rose to $13.1 million, more than seven times the $1.8 million Trump originally cited. The pool is a small thing, but it is a perfect symbol of misplaced priorities.

Finally, consider the verdict. Fox News found that Trump’s job approval stood at 38% with 62% disapproving.

Even Republican leaders have admitted it:

• Vice President JD Vance blamed the party’s losses on the Iran war, and Ron DeSantis warned that Republicans could struggle to win back Congress in 2028.
• Trump himself told Fox Business, “I think a part of it was Iran.”
• Closer to home, Republican State Sen. Matt Brass, who just won reelection in neighboring Coweta, told The Citizen on election night that Republicans “have got to take a long, hard look inside.”

The Fayette Proof

Fayette offers some of the clearest evidence that Tuesday was a rejection of Trump rather than a rejection of Republicans.

Thousands of Fayette voters appear to have split their tickets, backing Ossoff for Senate and Jackson for governor. Put those results side by side, with Collins losing Fayette by 14 points, statewide Republican incumbents losing by 2 to 3, Jack holding on by 131 votes, and local Republicans winning by about 16, and it is clear Fayette voters were judging Republicans race by race rather than voting a party line.

Fayette voters did not walk away from Republicans who talked about their community. They turned hardest against the top of the national ticket where the president’s record weighed the most.

Now, some of you may push back on this. You could say the president’s party almost always loses midterms, that inflation comes from global oil prices, or that confronting Iran was necessary for national security. Others may point out that Trump brought new voters into the party in 2024. But the normal midterm pendulum does not explain losing Senate seats in Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina. Global oil prices do not explain why two-thirds of voters blamed tariffs, which were a choice.

Time To Move On

If you are a Republican, you should be angry about Tuesday, not because Democrats took this election away from you, but because Donald Trump gave it to them.

He has shown, again and again, that he is more interested in himself than in building a party that appeals to more Americans. He started a war voters didn’t want. He imposed tariffs voters blame for higher costs. He told Americans inflation was solved while they paid more at the pump and the grocery store. And he spent time and money on vanity projects while those concerns went unaddressed.

The Republican Party does not need Donald Trump to win in Fayette. Tuesday proved that. Republican candidates won here by focusing on local issues and local voters.

The party that wins the next big election will be the one that listens to people at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and around their kitchen tables. Republicans can be that party again. But first, they have to move beyond the man who just cost them Congress.

November 7, 2028 will be here in 733 days