-- and they often skew more liberal.
These articles describe the shifts that have moved the GOP focus to the northern counties:
Shifting demographics in suburban Atlanta prompt GOP to head north
- Christian Science Monitor, 12/12/2022
When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp made one of his first general election campaign swings in August, he went straight to the modern heartland of the state’s Republican Party.
It wasn’t Buckhead, the glitzy Atlanta neighborhood where Governor Kemp lives in a governor’s mansion dwarfed by other nearby estates. And it wasn’t suburban Cobb County, once the bastion of Newt Gingrich.
Instead, Governor Kemp kept going north, deep into the Georgia mountains that have become one of the most Republican areas in the country over the past three decades. He stopped at a gas station turned coffee shop in Toccoa to urge people to “turn out an even bigger vote here in this county and in northeast Georgia than we’ve ever seen before.”
“Ask your kids, your grandkids, your friend’s kid, are they registered to vote?” Governor Kemp told attendees. “If they’re eligible, and they’re not, we got to get them registered, and we’ve got to go tell them to pull it for the home team.”
The emphasis on this rural region represents a notable shift in the GOP’s strategy in Georgia. The party grew into a powerhouse in Georgia once it began combining a strong performance in the Atlanta suburbs with growing dominance in rural areas. But that coalition has frayed in recent years as voters in the booming Atlanta region rejected the GOP under former President Donald Trump, turning this one time Republican stronghold into the South’s premier swing state.
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https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2022/0912/Shifting-demographics-in-suburban-Atlanta-prompt-GOP-to-head-north
In Atlanta, reverse migration is beginning to skew suburbs blue
- ABC News, 11/20/2019
Atlanta, host of the fifth Democratic debate, is a rapidly growing example of what is becoming a trend among the South: the “great reverse migration.”
In the midst of this change, statewide Democrats saw unprecedented success in the 2018 midterms, flipping fourteen state legislative seats in the House and two in the Senate.
Part of that success, experts say, can be credited to the growth of the black voting-age population in Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs.
Data compiled by Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts, of 2018 census population estimates, shows that seven of the 10 counties with the fastest-growing black population are near Atlanta. In the last decade, the region has seen a 14 percent increase in black voting-age residents, compared with a three percent rise for white residents, according to research compiled by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, from the Current Population Survey.
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/atlanta-reverse-migration-beginning-skew-suburbs-blue/story?id=67106895
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