Luanda, the largest city in Angola, is home to over 10 million people. In addition to being the capital, it is the economic and industrial center of Angola, serving as the primary gateway for international business in the country. Despite this, there are on average only 27 flights departing from the city a day. In contrast, the city of Hyderabad, India, which has a comparable population of 11 million, hosts almost 300 departing flights daily. This pattern is reflected across the African continent, wherein large cities have significantly fewer daily flights than their similarly sized Indian counterparts. Kinshasa has 15 compared to Kolkata’s 204, Lagos has 72 while Bangalore has 388, and Dar es Salaam has only 40 whereas Ahmedabad has 137.

Flights are the primary means of international travel across long distances. People travel for business, leisure, and to visit friends and family. They represent tangible links connecting cities and countries. Thus, the lack of flights to a particular city suggests a disconnect from the global economy. Like India, the economies of most African countries are still developing. Yet, the difference in flight traffic between the two raises the question: why are African cities so much more disconnected from the global economy than Indian cities?

In order to answer this, it is important to examine how these cities have grown over the past few decades. In the case of Luanda and Hyderabad, both cities have added millions of new residents since the 1990’s, but this growth has been fueled by different factors. The growth of Hyderabad has been driven by job creation across a diverse array of sectors such as the IT, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing industries. Major international companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have set up offices in the city, bolstering its status as an international economic hub. On the other hand, urbanization in Luanda was primarily driven by the fact that there were few other places in the country for people to move to. During and after the Angolan Civil War, Luanda remained as one of the only safe locations in the country where people could seek out economic opportunities. Meanwhile, the economic opportunities within the city are largely limited to the oil industry, which is not sufficient to create a diversified economy and generate enough jobs to support a city as large as Luanda. People moved to Luanda not because they wanted to, but because they had to, while the few jobs that created actual wealth remained inaccessible to the majority of the population, creating a city with vast inequalities. This has left Luanda disconnected from the global economy.

The situation of Luanda is reflective of a larger trend occurring within various countries across Africa, where countries are urbanizing without globalizing. The economies of many African countries are dominated by the extraction and export of natural resources such as oil, timber, and minerals. The vast majority of Nigeria’s exports are petroleum products; Tanzania’s largest single export is gold; copper and cobalt make up the largest exports for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Resource extraction-based industries generate demand for certain urban goods and services, but the jobs created as a result of this demand are often low-paying service jobs in the informal sector. As a result, wealth in these cities remains concentrated in the hands of the socioeconomic elite, which creates little incentive to build and maintain public services and infrastructure. Only one city in all of Sub-Saharan Africa (Lagos) has a metro system, whereas 17 cities in India have metros. Greater investment in public infrastructure helps lower the cost of doing business in a city, which incentivizes companies to invest and create jobs. Poor infrastructure in cities also disincentivizes tourism, which is another large industry that creates jobs and increases the demand for flights. Out of the top 15 largest cities in Africa, the only two with more than 200 daily flights are Cairo, Egypt, and Johannesburg, South Africa. Egypt and South Africa are the second and fourth most visited countries in Africa respectively, which helps to explain the higher number of flights for cities in those countries. Cape Town, a major international tourist destination in South Africa, has 113 daily flights, whereas Yaounde, Cameroon, has only 8, even though both cities have around 5 million people.

Historically, urbanization has been a sign of economic development since the Industrial Revolution. Cities like London and Paris grew rapidly in the 19th century, New York and Tokyo in the 20th century, and Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the 21st. In these instances, urban growth was largely driven by manufacturing and service sectors creating enough new jobs to entice people to move from rural areas to cities. This traditional pattern of urbanization is the one that most Indian cities are following. Mumbai’s growth has been fueled by the financial and entertainment industries; Hyderabad and Bangalore by the tech industry; and Chennai by the automotive and healthcare sectors. Cities like Luanda, Kinshasa, and Lagos on the other hand, have urbanized due to factors like conflict, climate change, and the lack of rural job opportunities, pushing people to move to the only areas with wealth in those countries. Yet, this wealth remains inaccessible to most people who move, creating a society with severe economic inequality.  

The differences between the wave of urbanization taking place in India versus Africa highlights the failure of many African governments to build cities that serve the people who live there. Instead, many African cities have been built with the rich elite in mind, with projects such as grand stadiums, statues, and high-rise apartments being prioritized over public transit, power, and sewage infrastructure.  If these countries seek to transition from being developing nations to becoming industrialized, globalized states, then they must redefine their development priorities by starting at the city level.

Gwinnett County is politically fascinating. The county is solidly suburban, with its county seat, Lawrenceville, approximately 28 miles northeast of Atlanta. It is also the second-most populous county in Georgia, with 957,062 residents, according to the 2020 Census. The county is also fast-growing, especially in the metro-Atlanta area, with its population increasing by 19 percent between 2010 and 2020.

Gwinnett is incredibly diverse, tied with Alameda County, California, for the seventh-most diverse county in the U.S. It is also the most diverse county in the state of Georgia, with a diversity index of 75.1 percent. Nevertheless, just two decades ago, Gwinnett was not nearly as diverse as it is today. In 2000, the county was mostly White, at 67 percent of the population. 13 percent of residents were Black, 11 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent Asian. Since then, the county has rapidly diversified, and today, the county is overwhelmingly majority-minority, with a bare White plurality. Thirty-two percent of residents are White, 31 percent Black, 22 percent Hispanic, and 14 percent Asian.

Between 1980 and 2012, the county voted for the Republican presidential candidate every year. In 2000, Republicans had a firm grip on county-level politics, voting for George W. Bush by a nearly 2-1 margin, not sending a single Democrat in any of the districts within its boundaries to the General Assembly, and not electing a single Democrat to county-wide office or the county commission.

However, in 2016, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, carried Gwinnett in an election-night stunner, even as she lost Georgia overall. Clinton was the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the county since native-Georgian Jimmy Carter ran in 1976. The county has moved to solid Democratic turf, voting for Democrats up and down the ballot in 2018 and onward. Today’s political landscape is almost the opposite of 2000, with Democrats controlling all of the county-wide political offices, four of the five seats on the commission, and electing many more Democrats to the General Assembly than Republicans.

Aside from realignment, Gwinnett has also been the center of recent political controversies. In 2018, the U.S. House race for District 7, which at the time included most of the county, was the closest in the nation. After a recount, incumbent Republican Congressman Rob Woodall won by a meager 419 votes. The close election result added to political conflict in the county after thousands of absentee and provisional ballots were not initially counted, two-thirds of which were cast by minority voters. 

Gwinnett was also the center of a redistricting fight in 2020. In the decennial process, the Republican-led General Assembly redrew Gwinnett’s county commission districts, ignoring the commission’s proposed map. Instead, the state legislature created a district in the northern part of the county that is more Republican and where more white voters reside. Democrats criticized the state’s map, which was implemented, for packing voters of color into the three other commission districts. Republicans defended that the district represented more rural stretches of the county.

The following article is part of a series of articles analyzing Gwinnett’s political realignment that began in 2016. This article examines federal-level election returns in Gwinnett since 2000. Later installments of this series will address state and local races, partisan change, and the factors driving the county’s realignment.

Presidential Elections

Twenty-first-century presidential election results in Gwinnett show how much the county has changed politically. Between 2000 and 2020, the Democratic presidential candidates increased their vote percentage by 26 percentage points. The results also present three phases of realignment in Gwinnett: pre-Obama era Republican dominance, increasing competition during the Obama era but still a Republican lean, and post-Obama era Democratic ascendancy.

In the pre-Obama era elections, 2000 and 2004, the Democratic candidates Al Gore and John Kerry each received 34 percent of the vote. Nonetheless, support for the party surged by 11 percentage points from 2004 to 2008, when Barack Obama garnered 45 percent of the vote. Obama again secured 45 percent of the vote in the 2012 election. 

In 2016, in a surprise to observers statewide, Clinton flipped the county to the Democratic Party, taking 53 percent of the vote and building on Obama’s vote percentage by eight percentage points. In 2020, President Joe Biden converted Gwinnett into solid Democratic territory by expanding on Clinton’s victory by six percentage points to win a landslide 59 percent of the vote. Strong margins in the county undoubtedly contributed to Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia that year. 

Observing raw vote trends in Presidential elections in Gwinnett demonstrates key changes in voting in the county since 2000. Since 2004, the raw vote total for Republican candidates has remained nearly stagnant, averaging 158,500 votes. In his re-election campaign, former President Donald Trump only managed 6,000 more votes than when former President George W. Bush was in the same position in 2004.

Republican stagnation contrasts sharply with the Democratic raw vote total, which increased fourfold between 2000 and 2020. In 2000 and 2004, Gore and Kerry fell below the 100,000 vote threshold, at 61,000 and 82,000, respectively. 

As the two-party vote results demonstrated, Democratic support in Gwinnett surged in 2008. Compared to Kerry, Obama received 47,317 more votes, increasing the raw Democratic vote by a massive 58 percent. In 2012, Obama received only 3,000 more votes than he did in 2008. 

The raw Democratic vote substantially increased again in 2016, with Clinton obtaining 34,000 more votes than in Obama’s 2012 performance, for a 26 percent increase. Biden 

turned out 77,000 more voters than Clinton, a 46 percent increase from 2016. This occurred as turnout notably increased nationwide in 2020. 

U.S. Senate Elections

Twenty-first-century regular U.S. Senate election results in Gwinnett also reveal the extent to which the county has realigned. Between 2002 and 2022, the Democratic Senate candidates increased their vote percentage by 26 percent. Furthermore, starting in 2010, Democratic candidates have boosted the party’s share of the two-party vote from the previous election. 

In 2000, the Democratic candidate, incumbent Senator Zell Miller, received 51 percent of the two-party vote in the county, outperforming Gore by 17 percentage points in a sign of split-ticket voting during that election. However, support for the party plunged in 2002 when incumbent Senator Max Cleland ran for re-election and obtained 35 percent of the two-party vote. Likewise, in 2004, Denise Majette received 33 percent. Compared to 2000, split ticketing declined significantly as Majette only underperformed Kerry by one percentage point. Another Democratic candidate for the Senate did not receive a majority of the two-party vote again until Jon Ossoff ran in the 2020 regular Senate election. 

In 2008, Obama’s coattails followed candidate Jim Martin as he, like Majette, underperformed the presidential candidate by only one percentage point to receive 45 percent of the county’s vote. Martin improved upon Majette as Democratic support increased by 12 percentage points, out-doing the increase in Democratic presidential support between 2004 and 2008.

Starting in 2014 with Michelle Nunn, Democratic candidates, on average, increased the percentage of the Democratic vote in Gwinnett from the previous by approximately five percentage points. Nunn increased Michael Thurmond’s, the 2010 candidate, share of the two-party vote by nine percentage points. 

While Clinton carried Gwinnett with 53 percent of the two-party vote, her coattails did not wholly show through in a signal of down-ballot lag. Jim Barksdale, a relatively unknown businessman to Georgia voters and first-time candidate, ran against incumbent Senator Johnny Isakson, who was popular among Georgia voters. Barksdale achieved 48 percent of the county’s two-party vote, a five percentage point drop off compared to Clinton and demonstration of the 2016 election as a dealignment election for the county rather than a complete realignment.

Nonetheless, in 2020, Jon Ossoff became the first Democratic candidate since Miller to win the county in a Senate contest, romping his competitor, incumbent David Perdue, with 58 percent of the two-party vote. Ossoff bettered Barksdale’s percentage by a whopping ten percentage points. In 2022, incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock slightly surpassed Ossoff, winning 60 percent of the two-party vote to become the first Democratic candidate running for any position to cross the 60 percent line in Gwinnett in the twenty-first century.

Congressional Elections

Of all federal races occurring in Gwinnett, Democrats have faced the most difficulty in congressional elections, mainly due to the party not fielding candidates in every district in the county in the years 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2016. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party has demonstrated the most improvement in congressional elections of any other type of contest. Between 2000 and 2022, the Democratic party massively increased its two-party vote percentage by 43 percentage points. 

Congressional elections in the county validate the Democratic Party’s struggle to be competitive in the county before 2008, with the party bottoming out at 14 percent of the two-party vote in 2000 because it did not run a candidate in the District 11, which included more of the county’s population than the two other districts in the county: the Districts 4 and 6. 

In 2002, the party increased its proportion of the two-party vote by 11 percentage points for 25 percent. Continuing its struggles, the party then regressed in 2004 to 15 percent of the vote but enormously improved to 32 percent in 2006.

Furthermore, the Democratic Party’s percentage of the two-party vote in the county’s congressional elections did not cross the 40-percent line until 2008, when Obama’s coattails carried down the ballot, with U.S. House candidates netting 44 percent of the two-party vote. After this election, Democratic candidates in the county averaged 43 percent of the vote between 2010 and 2016, with their best performance in 2014 when they pulled 48 percent of the two-party vote because the Republican Party did not have a standing candidate in the District 4. 

In 2016, again exemplifying split-ticket voting with votes for Clinton at the top of the ticket and Republicans down-ballot, Democratic candidates collectively captured 45 percent of the two-party vote in U.S. House races. However, no candidate stood for the party in District 10, including the smallest electorate of Gwinnett residents. 

In 2018, the party achieved a majority of the two-party vote in congressional contests in Gwinnett for the first time in the twenty-first century, with 56 percent of the vote and an 11 percentage point increase from 2016. Democrats reached this feat by winning 55 percent of the vote in District 7, which included most of the county’s population. In that race, first-time candidate Carolyn Bourdeaux ran vigorously against Republican incumbent Rob Woodall. After a recount, Bourdeaux came just 419 votes short of flipping the district, which covered a more Republican area in Forsyth County as well. 

In 2020, the party attained its apex of the two-party vote in congressional elections in the county with 58 percent of the vote and Biden’s coattails almost entirely flowing down-ballot. That election, Bourdeaux, running for the second time, beat a MAGA conservative, Rich McCormick, outright in District 7. She landed 58 percent of the vote in the Gwinnett portion of the district. The party also received 57 percent of the two-party vote in the 2022 midterms, with the Democratic Representative Lucy McBath winning District 7 after representing the Sixth District, including the north Atlanta suburbs, for four years.

Conclusion

Although Gwinnett was Republican-leaning territory through 2014, the county has solidly realigned to the Democratic Party. After the 2000 U.S. Special Senate election that Zell Miller ran in, the county did not vote for another Democrat until Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency in 2016. However, that cycle was more of a dealignment election for the county it voted for Republicans in down-ballot races. In 2018, the county completely realigned to the Democratic Party, giving Democratic candidates a substantial majority vote to U.S. House candidate Carolyn Bourdeaux. The county became even more Democratic in 2020, with Joe Biden leading the way, and the county again chose Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections.

Prior to this year’s midterm elections, political media and election forecasters predicted an electoral blowout for Republicans across the United States. Weeks before the election, Blake Hounshell of the New York Times warned that “Red October” had arrived. Similarly, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a premier election handicapper, predicted Republicans to pick up 24 seats in the House and make gains in the Senate and governorships. 

By all means, Georgia Republicans had a good election night. They won every race for statewide office, triumphed in nine of Georgia’s fourteen U.S. House districts, and retained control of the state legislature. 

However, despite these wins, Georgia Republicans failed to gain a much-needed Senate seat on Election Day, with Herschel Walker and Sen. Raphael Warnock heading to a runoff on December 6. Moreover, when examining the numbers, we find that the anticipated “Red Wave” did not crash in Georgia.

Generally speaking, for a wave election to occur, a political party makes significant gains in the number of races they win. Typically, for a party to do this, they must significantly outperform their constituency’s partisan lean. Overall, the idea of partisan lean is to gauge how Republican or Democratic an area is compared to the rest of the nation. 

According to FiveThirtyEight, Georgia’s partisan lean is R+7.4. This means that in a neutral political environment nationwide, Georgia would vote for Republican candidates by a margin of 7.4%. In a wave election, Republicans would probably win Georgia by upwards of 12%. This neither happened in Georgia nor the Athens metropolitan area in this year’s midterm elections.

Statewide Races

Among the statewide races, Republican candidates won by an average of 6.4%, an underperformance of 1% compared to what the partisan lean would expect. This relative underperformance indicates a near-neutral environment in Georgia, where Democrats slightly exceeded their usual baseline.

The topline races bolster this notion. In the Senate election, Warnock vastly outran the state’s partisan lean by 8.3%. Warnock also expanded on President Biden’s 2020 victory by 0.7%, mainly by improving on margins in the Atlanta metro area. However, the Senate race will head to a runoff because Warnock did not surpass 50% of the vote, receiving 49.4%.

Meanwhile, in the gubernatorial election, Kemp defeated Stacey Abrams by 7.6%,

practically in tandem with Georgia’s partisan lean. Even more, Kemp outran President Biden’s win by 7.8% with shifts toward the Republican in nearly every county in the state.

Moreover, Democrats surpassed FiveThirtyEight’s predicted results, which are calculated using a complex algorithm and multiple data inputs. In the Senate race, FiveThirtyEight forecasted Walker to edge out Warnock by a margin of 1.2% on election night, but both candidates to still move on to a runoff. However, Warnock bested Walker by 0.9% on election night, exceeding FiveThirtyEight’s expectation by 2.1%. 

In the Governor race, FiveThirtyEight forecasted Kemp to win by 8.2%. While Kemp still won the race outright by 7.6% on election night, he underran FiveThirtyEight’s prediction by 0.6%.

U.S. House Races

Georgia’s U.S. House races point towards an even stronger Democratic overperformance across Georgia. Of all votes cast in each of Georgia’s fourteen congressional districts, voters preferred Republican candidates by 4.7%, a 2.7% statewide underperformance for them.

The weakest result came from Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene in GA-14, who posted a 13.4% underperformance, likely due to her unpopularity. However, not just Republican unpopularity bolstered Democratic candidates, as nine of them in other districts also exceeded their district’s partisan lean. For example, Rep. David Scott of GA-13, which includes the southwest suburbs of Atlanta, posted a robust 11% overperformance as well.

In addition, Democrats exceeded FiveThirtyEight’s expectations in every U.S. House race in Georgia. Democrats, on average, outpaced FiveThirtyEight’s predicted margins by 6.9%. The strongest overperformance came from Rep. Nikema Williams who surpassed FiveThirtyEight’s model by 16.3% in the GA-05, which includes much of the city of Atlanta. Other strong Democratic performances, again, came in GA-13 and GA-14 with 14.5% and 11.4% overperformances, respectively.

Statewide Races in the Athens Metro Area

Statewide shifts also somewhat translate to the Athens metropolitan area (including Clarke, Madison, Oconee, and Oglethorpe counties). In Clarke county, Walker underran Trump by 2.1%. However, the Athens metro as a whole shifted to Walker by 1%, primarily due to a reduced Democratic base turnout in Clarke and Walker improving the margin in Oconee.

As for the gubernatorial race, Kemp swamped Trump’s performance in the Athens metro, with an 8.6% shift to the governor in Clarke alone. In the Athens metro, Kemp totaled an even larger 11.4% shift, powered by a robust 14.4% improvement in Oconee.

Georgia’s Tenth Congressional District in the Athens Metro Area

In GA-10, which includes all of Athens metro, Republican Mike Collins handily defeated Democrat Tabitha Johnson-Green. Still, Collins underran the district’s R+31.2 lean by 2.4%. However, in Clarke, Collins improved over Biden’s performance by 5% and bested Biden’s margin by 7% in Athens metro overall.

Conclusion

In sum, Georgia Republicans have a lot to be happy about: they kept their trifecta in the state government, won in many of the state’s congressional districts, and even have one last chance to push Walker into the Senate. Nonetheless, Republicans did not put up the number statewide to attain the “red wave” many of them were expecting. Instead, they ended up underrunning the state’s partisan lean and forecaster expectations in several statewide races and underran the partisan lean and predictions in most of Georgia’s congressional districts.

In Athens, the picture is a little murkier. Republicans saw firm shifts to them in the Governor and GA-10 races compared to 2020. However, those shifts did not pass over to the Senate race. Simply, Republicans did not put up consistent enough numbers to claim that a wave hit the shore.

Every day, Internet users generate millions of gigabytes of data. Every time someone clicks a link, visits a website, uses an app, or makes a phone call, data is created. These actions are tracked, recorded, and added to increasingly large datasets. The creation of these truly massive datasets and the newfound ability to analyze them thanks to cheap hardware and improved algorithms has led observers to call this phenomenon “Big Data”. The consulting firm McKinsey called Big Data the “next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.”

Technology companies have been well aware of Big Data and its implications for the past decade. Google and Facebook comb their billions of users’ actions to personalize ads and search results. Netflix and Amazon analyze users’ browsing and reviewing histories to offer personalized recommendations on new products. Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup, has worked with the CIA and the FBI to analyze and integrate intelligence data to disrupt terrorist networks and combat credit card fraud.  However, 2012 was the first time that large-scale data analytics entered the political arena, leading some observers to dub it the “Year of Big Data.”

As people share increasing amounts of personal information online through their social networks, purchasing history, and browsing habits, companies—and political campaigns—will learn much more about them. Nate Silver, a statistician blogging for the New York Times, used aggregated data analysis to consistently predict Barack Obama’s electoral victory to be a near certainty, drawing the ire of political pundits pushing “too close to call” narratives in opinion columns and nightly talk shows. Joe Scarborough, a conservative political commentator with MSNBC, criticized Silver’s analysis, asserting that “anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.” Indirectly referencing the furor over Silver’s predictions in his New York Times column, David Brooks wrote, “If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.” But come Election Day, Silver correctly predicted the winner of all fifty states and the District of Columbia

The 2012 election also saw both the Obama and Romney campaigns using complex data analysis algorithms operating on massive voter databases. These algorithms integrated data from multiple sources to create targeted, personalized ad campaigns and identify swing voters most susceptible to campaign advertising. The campaigns spent tens of millions of dollars hiring teams of data scientists to merge offline and online data to create sophisticated profiles of potential voters—how likely a voter was to donate, how often an individual talks to friends about politics, what messaging would be most effective to persuade an indecisive voter, and more.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In the midst of the recent debate on gun control, some have suggested creating a massive database of all guns and ammo purchases, with data algorithms identifying unusual patterns in purchase history and flagging individuals most likely to attack others with guns. As Republicans and Democrats battle over deficits and budget cuts, data mining may play a vital role in reducing fraud and waste in government expenditures. From education to healthcare to counterterrorism, Big Data promises to transform many of the issues currently debated on Capitol Hill.

The greatest obstacle to the rise of data crunchers is concern about privacy and the amount of information corporations, campaigns, and governments have on individuals. Target was caught in a public relations nightmare when its algorithms sent pregnancy related coupons to a teenage girl’s house before she had told her father about the pregnancy. The Federal Trade Commission now requires Facebook to undergo privacy audits for the next two decades after the social network provided user data to third parties for advertising and app development. At the same time that the Obama administration was pushing for greater online privacy protections, the Obama campaign was collecting vast amounts of data about potential voters through the very same methods the administration was trying to impede. As data collectors become increasingly aggressive in collecting information, policymakers face the difficult task of respecting privacy rights without choking off the power of Big Data.

The politics of the future will be a much more precise affair—more evidence based, more targeted, and more invasive. In the coming years, the advanced techniques employed by the Obama and Romney campaigns will trickle down to statewide and local races. Elections will be decided not on eloquent speeches or slick photo ops, but on the volume of data gathered. Political pundits will eventually have to incorporate rigorous metrics into their analysis, or risk embarrassment and ridicule from the Nate Silvers of the world. Welcome to the age of Big Data.