Atlanta could play a big role in turning Georgia blue. It has been the epicenter of what demographers are calling the “reverse Great Migration,” a trend that is seeing black people whose great-grandparents may have moved up north for better job opportunities during the Jim Crow era, move back south. The Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell metro area gained 251,000 black people between 2010 and 2016, which made it the metro area in the United States that added the most black people over that time period, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. “The increasing black presence via continued in-migration will almost certainly help to make Georgia a swing state in future elections,” Frey told me.

Abrams’s race for governor could also send a clear message to Democrats: Appealing to progressives can be a winning strategy. As the 2016 race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton showed, the Democratic National Committee has at times been hesitant to embrace progressive candidates. Targeting moderates and one-time Republicans could be especially intriguing this year, as Republicans wary of President Donald Trump may be convinced to vote Democratic. But Abrams’s campaign is a chance for Democrats to take a different tack, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written—one that focuses instead on progressives and minorities. It’s a strategy that makes sense demographically: The country is projected to become majority-minority by 2044, and diversity is something the DNC has said it cares about. It’s also a strategy that some parts of the Democratic Party have recently been pushing. Prominent progressives, including California Senator Kamala Harris, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and even Sanders himself, endorsed Abrams ahead of the primary.

Abrams’s campaign is approaching the elections with a different strategy than those of previous candidates in Georgia, including that of Jason Carter, the grandson of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who lost the gubernatorial race to Nathan Deal in 2014. Carter and previous Democratic candidates reached out to white, suburban voters who might lean Republican, and tried to convince them to vote for Democrats. Abrams’s campaign has instead targeted reliable Democratic voters like black people throughout the state who may have stayed home in 2014 and 2016. Her campaign has painted her as progressive, rather than moderate: fiercely pro-choice, in favor of public schools and gun control. Statewide Democrats have lost previous races by 200,000 or so votes, a number Abrams’s campaign thinks it can pick up from black people and progressives who might have been turned off by the moderate messages of previous Democratic candidates.

The reverse migration of black people to Georgia might help her cause. The new migrants to the Atlanta region are often young, black, and more progressive than the people who already live in the region, according to Sabrina Pendergrass, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who has studied the reverse Great Migration. Their education background is a contrast to the people who moved north during the Great Migration that began in 1916—those migrants were often less educated than the black people who already lived in cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Unmarried black people, college-educated black people, and women seem to be moving South in especially large numbers, Pendergrass said. They’re moving for better job opportunities, for lower housing prices, and to get out of neighborhoods in industrial cities that may be still struggling with crime, she said. Atlanta now has the largest black Millennial population in the country.