Looking at the polls from the key battleground state of Georgia in the months before the US election, it should perhaps be no surprise that Donald Trump prevailed in the Peach State. His lead over Kamala Harris was small but persistent from August onwards.

Why, then, does it feel like a shock here in the state capital, Atlanta, where I was based for the week of the election? The city is heavily Democratic, even in the affluent suburbs, and is teeming with signs reading: “Harris, obviously.” When Harris visited the city the weekend before polling day, the crowd was packed in and energised, anticipating a win for America’s first female president.

Enclaves like Atlanta are a familiar sight on the electoral maps of the US, and they tell a story of the Democratic party’s struggle to make inroads with white, working class and rural America. Joe Biden’s victory in the state in 2020 now looks like an anomaly that the Democrats were hoping was the start of a trend.

Indeed, it may well be that the pandemic muddied the waters of electoral trends in the US, because in 2024 Trump made gains in almost every demographic in Georgia compared with his performance in 2020. This includes among black women and people with college degrees, two groups that are now solidly Democrat throughout the US.

Just as important are the gains Trump made within his own base. Small but significant increases in voter turnout appear to have broken for Trump. This may be partly due to a narrative flip from 2020, when Trump’s campaign urged people to vote in person and (wrongfully) not to trust mail-in ballots, believing the system favoured Democrats.

This time, however, Republican voters were strongly encouraged to vote early using that same system. A record 4 million early votes were cast in Georgia, which was initially taken to be a good sign for Harris, but looks to have been (at least in part) a reflection of the new Republican strategy.

Georgia had been braced for trouble. In 2020, the state was at the heart of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election. In a now infamous phone call on January 2 2021, Trump lobbied Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn Biden’s victory in the state and secure the presidency. Raffensperger’s refusal to comply led to death threats.

The threat of violence did not dissipate as the election approached in 2024. Election officials in the state were issued with panic buttons and protected by armed security guards in preparation for disorder at vote counts.

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And on election day itself, several polling locations had to be evacuated due to hoax bomb threats that the FBI believes originated in Russia. But, in any event, voting passed peacefully and the result was less of a knife-edge than had been predicted. The reasons for this are embedded in Georgia’s difficult history.

Georgia’s long shadow

Georgia has long played a pivotal role in US presidential elections and political movements. Democratic candidates champion the state’s history as the cradle of the civil rights movement, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr, and the home of civil rights icon John Lewis. But this sits in an uneasy coexistence with Georgia’s history at the heart of the American civil war.

After solid Democrat rule stretching from the end of the civil war in 1865 to the 1960s, the state pivoted to the Republican party after discontent with the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in the US by prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin.

That resentment was exploited by the so-called “southern strategy”: the playbook Richard Nixon used that same decade to increase support for the Republican party among white voters by stirring racial divisions and campaigning against federal welfare programmes.

But the past 20 years have seen a slow shift back towards the Democrats. Georgia’s growing and diversifying population, especially in urban and suburban areas like Atlanta, has reshaped its political landscape.

The 2020 census revealed the state’s significant ethnic minority populations have increased. Almost one-third of its citizens are African American, and a further 10% are Hispanic or Latino. White, non-Hispanic Georgians now make up just over half the population – the lowest this figure has ever been.

Racial divides are played out geographically, with diverse urban districts far removed from Georgia’s overwhelmingly white rural population. Those geographic divides are partly due to aggressive gerrymandering within the state that has reduced competitiveness in a majority of districts and diminished the power of minority votes.

A federal court ruling in 2023 stated that “Georgia has not reached the point where the political process has equal openness and equal opportunity for everyone.” Indeed, in the wake of the 2020 election and in direct response to Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud, the Republican-dominated Georgia state legislature took the opportunity to pass Senate Bill 202.

This is a set of voting restrictions that Biden referred to as “Jim Crow in the 21st century” for its disproportionate impact on black and ethnic minority voters in the state. It was a nod to the white supremacist laws in place across many southern states and some cities in the north from the 1880s to the 1960s that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchisement. One Democratic state representative I interviewed for my research in 2023 called the bill “codified racial animus”.

For now, analysis and introspection will follow. But it is clear that even as Georgia positions itself for a changing future, the state still carries the ghosts of its past.