Georgia has become one of the most critical swing states in the country during the 2020 election cycle.
Using the Associated Press VoteCast tool, News4Jax has access to thousands of surveyed voters in the Peach State.
Data from VoteCast shows why the state was so close, closer than in previous election cycles.
One interesting note is the number of voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016.
Of the nearly 3,300 surveyed, 18% of voters say they did not vote in 2016. And among that group, former Vice President Joe Biden handily beat President Donald Trump, 59% to 39%.
“I think there are two obvious reasons for that," said Dr. Michael Binder, who’s a political pollster at the University of North Florida. “One is a lot of those votes and numbers are 18 and 21-year-olds that simply weren’t old enough to vote in 2016. And those votes are disproportionately Democrat, that’s something we know. The other piece we know some folks who had been disconnected or put off by Trump or Clinton in 2016.”
News4Jax also analyzed the voter breakdown among racial groups.
Among Black voters, Trump did not do well.
He did not eclipse double digits, only scoring 6% support in the survey compared to 92% for Biden.
However, Trump did do much better among white voters in Georgia in this survey beating Biden 69% to 29%.
Biden outpaced Trump among Hispanic voters 59% to 37% but Binder said that number is strong for Trump compared to Republican support in previous Presidential elections.
“That’s a really strong number for him," Binder said. “It’s up several percentage points from a couple of years ago. And we saw that again in Florida too. Cubans came out in enormous numbers for him.”
News4Jax also looked at how voters who chose to mail in their ballots viewed the election.
Nationally, vote-by-mail voters tended to support Biden and that was the case in Georgia.
Biden led Trump 69% to 30% among mail-in voters.