CONYERS, GEORGIA—Brandt Bester believes he would be dead or in jail had he stayed in his native New York City. Instead, he moved to the Atlanta area, earned an electronics degree, started a business selling cellphones, then opened a suburban restaurant.

“The American dream,” Bester, a soft-spoken 48-year-old, said at breakfast at a Waffle House in Rockdale County two weeks ago.

It is also the stuff of a Democratic Party dream inching closer to reality.

Bester is black, and he is voting for Hillary Clinton. He is part of a wave of African-American migration from liberal northern cities to long-conservative southern states that is making the Democrats competitive in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

Republican Donald Trump is still the favourite to win Georgia, and he leads by an average of three points. But the consistent tightness of a state that no Democrat has won since Bill Clinton’s 1992 squeaker is evidence not only of white conservatives’ rejection of Trump but a population shift that may change the electoral map well beyond November if the Republicans do not find a way to stop repelling non-whites.

Since a Democratic president signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Republicans have been able to count on white voters to carry them to victory in enough southern states to make them viable in every presidential election. With Democratic-leaning blacks moving to those states at the same time as their Democratic-leaning Hispanic and Asian populations boom, those states are looking less and less like Republican certainties.

“Demographically, we are a blue state. We’ve just got to get them registered, and we’ve got to turn them out,” said Atlanta-based Democratic strategist Tharon Johnson, the southern regional director for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “I’m optimistic that it can happen this time. But even if it doesn’t happen this time, it’s a tremendous step forward toward 2018 and 2020, when I believe Georgia will be blue again.”

Between 1910 and 1970, in what was called the “Great Migration,” an estimated six million black people left the segregated rural south and moved to such cities as New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit. Then some started moving back.

Since the 1970s, but especially since 2000, black northerners have returned by the tens of thousands to the states abandoned by their parents and grandparents. Fifty-seven per cent of the black U.S. population now lives in the south, the highest percentage since 1960; more than a million black people in the south are from the north, 10 times the number in 1970.

Many of the recent transplants are retirees attracted to the south by the warm weather and their family ties. A disproportionate percentage are college-educated young professionals drawn by job prospects, affordable housing and thriving black neighbourhoods. Some are lower-skill workers fleeing crime in places like Chicago.

No urban area has lured more black people over the past decade than metro Atlanta, a 20th-century hub of black political, financial and educational power and now also a 21st-century hip-hop mecca. (A hit new FX television show, created by actor-rapper Donald Glover, is titled simply Atlanta.) The move has become so common that it has turned into a running joke among young black northerners. A frequent refrain on social media: “Moving to Atlanta won’t solve your problems.”

Sidney Tomlinson, 77, said it has solved his. He was washing his Lexus on a sunny afternoon at his house on a silent, manicured street in suburban Rockdale County, a half-hour east of the city and a long way from the Bronx.

The vast majority of Atlanta’s new arrivals have chosen the suburbs rather than the city. Since 2000, the suburbs alone have added more than 500,000 black people. Tomlinson, a retired carpenter, moved in 2001 to escape crime and tension in his New York neighbourhood.

“Voting for Hillary,” he said. “Nobody but Hillary.”

Flint native Chuniq Inpower, a 29-year-old Michigan State graduate who owns a marketing business, moved to downtown Atlanta in 2014. She said she runs into so many fellow Michigan transplants that she sometimes calls the city “New Detroit.”

Her grandparents are from Mississippi and Alabama. Michigan has a “dying economy” for people like her. She knew Atlanta offered both a chance to make her dollars “stretch” and one of the country’s best networks of black female entrepreneurs.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“It was almost a no-brainer,” she said. “You don’t have to deal with those barriers to entry, if you will, when it’s already tailored to people that look like you.”

She, too, is voting for Clinton.

Sensing opportunity, Clinton and her allies are paying extra attention to a state Mitt Romney won by eight percentage points and John McCain by five. Vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine visited in late September. A pro-Clinton Super PAC decided last week to invest $2 million in Georgia television ads.

Rockdale County, home of Bester’s Sudo Bar and Grill, foreshadowed her strength in the state. Formerly a Republican stronghold, its black population has exploded since 2000, to 41,957 from 12,733, in part because of out-of-state migration.

In 2008, Rockdale elected its first black county chairman, Ohio transplant Richard Oden. In 2012, Oden’s all-black, all-Democratic “slate of eight” swept to victory over eight white Republicans, giving the county its first black sheriff, coroner and tax commissioner.

The swift transformation has sparked racial animosity. Oden said he was “threatened, ridiculed, talked about and harassed” by white residents after his first victory.

“Here you have this African-American man who now has the power of the ink pen to influence policy, and that was tough for this community to embrace and accept,” he said. “Not to mention the fact that they didn’t realize it was going to happen. They never thought it was going to happen. And they woke up and it changed.”

The state population of 10 million is now 32 per cent black, up from 26 per cent in 2000. Other demographic changes have further benefited Democrats. The Asian population (4 per cent) and Hispanic population (more than 9 per cent) have both doubled, and Atlanta is attracting out-of-state white millennials generally more liberal than white Georgia natives.

The white vote is Clinton’s Georgia challenge. In 2008, Obama managed to get 46 per cent of the vote in Georgia on high black turnout, but he got a mere 23-per-cent white support. Trump, the strategist Johnson said, gives Democrats a special chance to win over disaffected white Republicans, particularly moderate women.

“This year’s race, until proven otherwise, will essentially be an anomaly,” said Emory University political science professor Andra Gillespie. “If Georgia turns blue in that particular context, I don’t know if that’s a harbinger of change in the state or in Georgia’s competitiveness so much as it is a function of it being a blowout election.”

Clinton, indeed, is unlikely to need Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. But Republicans might need the wake-up call.

Read more about: