ATLANTA – Former President Donald Trump won Georgia’s 16 electoral votes Tuesday, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by a narrow margin, several national news outlets projected before 1 a.m. Wednesday.
With only three rural counties not having reported, Republican Trump led with 50.8% of the vote in the Peach State to 48.5% for Democrat Harris, according to unofficial results.
With the vice president’s loss in North Carolina, another critical swing state, the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin appeared to be the Democrats’ best chance at retaining the White House.
As of midnight, Trump was leading Harris in Georgia by nearly 120,000 votes, far outperforming 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden narrowly defeated the incumbent president by just 11,799 votes. That razor-thin margin became infamous in January 2021, when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to “find” him the 11,780 votes he needed to prevail.
Raffensperger refused to go along, and GOP Gov. Brian Kemp turned down a push by some of Trump’s Republican allies in Georgia to call a special session of the General Assembly to appoint an alternate slate of presidential electors. Kemp said he didn’t have the authority under the state Constitution to give Trump what he wanted.
Kemp and Trump mended fences in recent weeks to the point that the governor gave Trump a key endorsement.
Both Trump and Harris traveled to Georgia for numerous rallies during the campaign. In a bid to gin up his already strong support in rural counties, Trump held a rally at a church in Zebulon and staged his final Georgia campaign rally in Macon.
As of early Wednesday, Trump needed to win just one of the Blue Wall states to become only the second president to lose a reelection bid and return to office for a second term four years later. Democratic President Grover Cleveland lost to Republican challenger Benjamin Harrison in 1888 but came back to defeat Harrison in 1892.