Thepolitics ofGeorgia change frequently and often follow the rest of theUnited States in major historical landmarks. The state has a long history, starting in the 18th century as a British colony. The cultural makeup of the early colony led to a ban onslavery being overturned soon after its implementation, setting the stage for the many plantations in the state. Rival governments were formed during theRevolutionary War, with thePatriot government surviving and forming a unified state government after the war. Georgian politics then followed theDemocratic-Republican Party before theAmerican Civil War and theDemocrats afterward. In fact, the state never voted Republican until 1964, making it the last continental state to do so. Since then, Democrats have won the state just four times, for native sonJimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, SouthernerBill Clinton in 1992, and forJoe Biden in 2020.

As the political ideologies of the Democratic andRepublican parties shifted in the 20th century, Georgia politicians moved to the Republican Party. Republicans won a Senate seat in the state for the first time in history in 1980. Then,Sonny Perdue became the first Republican governor in the state since 1872 upon his election in 2002. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, Georgia became a competitiveswing state,^[2] with Democrats narrowly winning all statewide federal elections in the2020 elections, establishing the state as a battleground on the federal level.^[3][4] However, the state of Georgia does currently continue to maintain a Republican lean on the state level and federal, with Republicans controlling every statewide office, having Republican majorities in the State House and Senate, as well as a complete Republican pick on the Georgia Supreme Court. Though losing the US Senate race in 2022, statewide Republicans vastly improved their margins of victory from 2018 to 2022 in Georgia. In 2024, Donald Trump flipped Georgia back into the Republican column winning it by 2.2%.

TheProvince of Georgia was founded in 1733 as aBritishcolony by aroyal charter through atrust led byJames Oglethorpe, a member ofParliament who had originally envisioned it as a place to resettle volunteeringdebtors instead of sending them toprison.^[5] It was named afterKing George II, the reigningmonarch of theKingdom of Great Britain and theThirteen Colonies at that time, who later were credited with banning slavery. The province recruited yeomen settlers to occupy land where the nativeYamasee had lived before theYamasee War, acted as a buffer to protect earlier settlements inSouth Carolina from theSpanish presence inFlorida, and hinderWest Africanslaves from escaping and reaching lands beyond thefrontier and the control of their owners.

Although most early Georgia colonists wereEnglish,Scottish, andGermanartisans seekingarable land orfreedom of religion, many of them complained to their leaders that the ban on slavery created alabor shortage that impeded localfinances, compared to otherSouthern colonies. After Spain failed to conquer the area during theWar of Jenkins' Ear, the province legalized slavery in 1749, altering the balance of power in the settlements. Thousands of slaves were imported to work onplantations producingrice,indigo, andsugar. Their owners, mostly South Carolina planters, were wealthier than the early settlers and soon gained most of the official political appointments in theCrown colony that replaced the trusteeship in 1754.

Georgia had two rival governments during theAmerican Revolutionary War: the appointedLoyalist regime ofJames Wright and thePatriot administration, initially led by planterArchibald Bulloch. After escaping revolutionary forces, Wright fled the colony in 1776 but organized a return in 1778 backed by British military force. After the war, he left again in 1782, evacuating with British forces following the end of hostilities and victory by the rebels. The British also evacuated thousands of slaves to whom they had promised freedom if they left rebel masters. They were resettled in the Caribbean and London.

Bulloch, who died in 1777, and his colleagues founded arepublican government. In 1788 Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the newU.S. Constitution.

Georgia had been settled alongAtlantic Ocean and theSavannah River. The drive of settlers for westward expansion made territorial issues prominent. An expansion from theAltamaha River to theSt. Marys River and the drawing of southern and northern borders neglected a western boundary. The colony assumed it would extend to thePacific Ocean; a nearer limit was theMississippi River. The federal government worked to reduce such early colonial claims, in the interest of establishing more states. In addition, nationwide anger among the 13 states about theYazoo land scandal resulted in Georgia leaders defining their claim in 1802 at theChattahoochee River up to itshead of navigation at the site of modernColumbus and a line running north by west from there.

In the earlyUnited States, most Georgia politicians were aligned with theJeffersonianDemocratic-Republican Party, favoringstrict constructionism inconstitutional law andstates' rights over federal power. Unlike theFederalist Party, which backed strong central government, Jeffersonians wanted a freer hand in bothIndian removal and expanded plantationslavery. Before the Revolution, Georgia was home to the nativeCreek andCherokee. The advent of thecotton gin in 1793, which made short-staple cotton profitable in the uplands of the state, and theGeorgia Gold Rush in 1829 spurred runs on land. TheGeorgia Land Lottery tried to reducecorruption by giving native lands to poorercitizens, but did so as nativetreaties such as theTreaty of Indian Springs (1825) were broken or revised.^{[citation needed]}

By the 1830s, Georgia politics was split by theJacksonianDemocratic Party and theAnti-JacksonianWhig Party. Congress passed theIndian Removal Act of 1830, favored by Jackson to void Indian land claims in the Southeast and permit development. TheU.S. Supreme Court ruled against Georgia's encroachment on other Indian land inWorcester v. Georgia in 1832, on the grounds that Indian natives were entitled to federal protection. But the ruling was ignored by both presidents and the state, and the federal government proceeded to forcibly remove Indians to west of the Mississippi River. The Cherokee were the last to be forced out, led along what they referred to as theTrail of Tears toIndian Territory, during which many people died.

Former Native American lands were developed for cotton cultivation, and planters brought in thousands of slaves to work the new lands. In 1842 the state legislature declared thatblack people were non-citizens. After theCompromise of 1850 tried to resolve slavery among the states as an issue of balance of power, theGeorgia Platform was accepted by manySoutherners as the policy by whichsecession could be avoided.

In the 1850s, most state Whigs joined a reinvented Democratic Party that became inflexible on the issues of supporting the expansion ofslavery and a highly devolvedfederalism. The victory ofAbraham Lincoln, who was considered a moderateabolitionist, in thepresidential election of 1860 was perceived as a threat to Georgia interests. This large slave society was the fifth state to secede from the Union. A founding member of theConfederate States of America in 1861, the state sent tens of thousands of soldiers to fight in theAmerican Civil War.^{[citation needed]}

As in other southern states, white conservative Democrats regained control of the state legislature in the 1870s, through a combination of force, intimidation and fraud, with widespread voter suppression of black Republicans. At the turn of the 20th century, Georgia passed a new constitution and amendments that in practicedisenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites. The exclusion of blacks from the political system was maintained well into the 1960s.^[6][7] The legislature passed laws to institute legal segregation of public facilities andJim Crow customs governed many informal rules placing blacks in second-class status.

In the postwar era after World War II, African Americans, particularly veterans, renewed their activism for civil rights, including being able to exercise the franchise. Conservative white Democrats formed theStates' Rights Democratic Party, splitting from the national Democratic Party. This group—whose members were calledDixicrats—was verysegregationist. It pushed for its candidateStrom Thurmond to be the Democratic presidential nominee in southern states. Georgia was the onlyDeep South state to rejectHarry Truman, the national Democratic nominee, as its candidate. Thurmond ran as a third-party candidate in the state.^[8]

During the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia made significant changes in civil rights, governance, and economic growth focused on Atlanta. It was a bedrock of the emerging "New South". In 1983, Georgia's tenthConstitution was ratified, and is the newest state constitution in the United States as of 2015.

In 2002,Sonny Perdue became the firstRepublican governor since theReconstruction.

In 2004, its voters passed a ban onsame-sex marriage with 76% voting yes.^[9] The ban was invalidated in 2015 by the United States Supreme Court caseObergefell v. Hodges.

About half of allappropriations in the Georgia state budget each year are funded bystate taxes, with the remainder ofrevenue coming fromfederal grants andstate bonds.

In the early 2020s, despite a Republicantrifecta in the state government, Democrats won all three statewide federal offices.Joe Biden narrowly won the state for his presidential campaign whileJon Ossoff andRaphael Warnock won the U.S. Senate elections, becoming the first Black and Jewish senators from the state, with Ossoff winning a full six-year term and Warnock winning to finish Republican senatorJohnny Isakson's term.^[3] The wins were reported to be due to the shift of white moderates toward the Democratic Party and the increased turnout ofAfrican-American voters.^[10][4] In2022, incumbent Democratic senator Warnock defeated Republican nomineeHerschel Walker in the election, winning a full six-year term in office. Also in 2022, Republicans however did win every statewide office in Georgia by margins of 5-10%, and incumbent Republican governorBrian Kemp won reelection by a raw margin of over 300,000 votes at 7.5% over Democrat Stacey Abrams. In 2024, Donald Trump flipped Georgia back into the Republican column winning it by 2.2%.

Georgia currently has 14House districts. In the 118th Congress, five of Georgia's seats are held by Democrats and nine are held by Republicans:

• Georgia's 1st congressional district represented byBuddy Carter (R)
• Georgia's 2nd congressional district represented bySanford Bishop (D)
• Georgia's 3rd congressional district represented byBrian Jack (R)
• Georgia's 4th congressional district represented byHank Johnson (D)
• Georgia's 5th congressional district represented byNikema Williams (D)
• Georgia's 6th congressional district represented byRich McCormick (R)
• Georgia's 7th congressional district represented byLucy McBath (D)
• Georgia's 8th congressional district represented byAustin Scott (R)
• Georgia's 9th congressional district represented byAndrew Clyde (R)
• Georgia's 10th congressional district represented byMike Collins (R)
• Georgia's 11th congressional district represented byBarry Loudermilk (R)
• Georgia's 12th congressional district represented byRick Allen (R)
• Georgia's 13th congressional district represented byDavid Scott (D)
• Georgia's 14th congressional district represented byMarjorie Taylor Greene (R)

Georgia's two United States senators are DemocratsJon Ossoff andRaphael Warnock, both serving since 2021.

Georgia is part of theUnited States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, theUnited States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, and theUnited States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia in the federal judiciary. The district's cases are appealed to the Atlanta-basedUnited States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

• Government of Georgia (U.S. state)
• Elections in Georgia (U.S. state)
• Official Code of Georgia
• Democratic Party of Georgia
• Georgia Republican Party

• Democratic Party of Georgia
• Georgia Republican Party (GAGOP)
• Georgia atBallotpedia
• Georgia atJudgepedia
• Campaign Materials Collection from the Georgia Archives

• Politics of Georgia (U.S. state)

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