By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College
Nearly every student of the political economy is aware of retrospective voting, where voters judge the party in power by the performance of the economy. If things are going great, the incumbent party is reelected or holds on to power. If it’s not going well, the party in charge has something to worry about. So how does it look for Georgia Republicans in 2026? And what is the growth outlook for Cobb County and other key counties in the Peach State?
Visual Capitalist has the 2025 numbers, and it doesn’t look great for the Georgia GOP. The state’s average real GDP growth rate was 1.9%. In case you’re wondering, “real” means the economists calculating it tease out inflation, so price spikes don’t artificially inflate the numbers. The average real GDP growth rate for the country was 2.1 percent.
It doesn’t get much better when you compare the Peach State to the rest of the states in the Southeast. The average regional growth rate is 2.3%. Georgia trails Florida (one of the nation’s leaders in growth at 3.1%) and South Carolina (3.1%), North Carolina (2.7%) as well as Texas (2.5%), along with Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee.
Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Mississippi and Missouri are the only states with teams in the SEC who trail Georgia.
Of course, the Georgia Republicans could say “Well, at least we’re not like California and New York!” But that would be a mistake. New York’s average real GDP growth rate is 2.9% and California’s real GDP growth rate is 2.5%, far ahead of Georgia’s.
Overall, things have slowed down in 2025, compared to 2024. Every Southern state except for Florida had a higher growth rate in the last two quarters of 2024 in real GDP growth than now according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis or BEA, and those are in numbers that discount inflation.
This could explain President Donald Trump’s anemic poll numbers in terms of approval ratings.
Still, Georgia is ahead of many in the Southeast, as the overall GDP (not the growth rate) places the Peach State at 23rd in the country, according to USA Facts.
It could be a tale of two Georgias. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we find that Cobb County is one of the growing areas in terms of percentage in change in covered employment for the large counties, followed by Fulton, Bibb and Clayton.
Forsyth is treading water, while DeKalb, Richmond, and Hall have a -0.5% decline in this statistic. It looks tougher for Gwinnett, Muscogee, Chatham and Henry, which round out the lowest performing among the big counties. It’s a rough indicator, but it still tells a big story.
As noted earlier, this is translating into success for the Democrats, according to a Fox News poll. “A new Fox News poll found Democrats have the edge over Republicans on economic issues for the first time since 2010. The survey, released Wednesday, found that 52 percent of respondents think Democrats would do a better job on the economy, while 48 percent backed Republicans on the issue.
The last time Fox News recorded a Democratic edge on the economy, it was May 2010 — as the country was emerging from the Great Recession. Since then, the outlet had conducted 10 polls on the subject until the latest one, with the GOP holding the advantage on each and holding as high as a 15-point edge on the economy in January 2022 and February 2023.”
If Rick Jackson, Michael Collins and other Georgia statewide candidates are to prevail, they’ll need a plan to explain how they’ll handle the lower economic numbers and affordability concerns.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” a thriller novel where corporate greed, media manipulation and academic intrigue collide in a deadly game of product placement, has been published by the Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/branded). His second novel, “Independent Thought,” about a third-party candidacy that brings America to its knees, is coming out later this summer with HIP (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/).