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“Typically, in runoffs, you’re just trying to turn out your voters again … because it’ll be a smaller universe of voters going back to vote without a presidential race going on,” said DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, a Democrat. “And [Warnock and Ossoff] will have to build on the coalition Biden built.”

Biden carried a high share of white voters for a Democrat in Georgia, but Trump may not push white suburbanites away from the GOP as strongly during a lame-duck runoff election as he has for the past four years. State Republicans rely more than ever on rural whites now, but without Trump on the ballot, they may not be as motivated to show up.

And Biden benefited heavily from booming turnout among voters of color, especially Black voters, who have proven their power in Georgia. But Warnock and Ossoff will need to motivate turnout just as high, under very different circumstances, in order to swing the state again.

“Donald Trump changed the election landscape,” said Chip Lake, a Republican consultant who worked for GOP Rep. Doug Collins in the Senate special election, which saw appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Warnock advance to January. “What we don’t know is, what happens to the electorate when he is [on his way] out of office and not on the ballot?”

Biden’s narrow Georgia lead was built on the clear, if challenging, path Stacey Abrams laid out in 2018. Abrams, who narrowly lost a run for governor but won Democratic plaudits for her message and talk-to-everybody campaign strategy, energized young voters, registered and turned out record numbers of people of color and peeled away white, college-educated voters in suburban counties, like Cobb and Gwinnett, that turned hard from Republicans in the Trump era.

Abrams, along with the voting-rights group Fair Fight she founded in 2018, also helped expand the electorate since then. Georgia has added 1 million new voters since 2016, thanks to policies allowing voter registration at motor vehicle bureaus as well as efforts by groups like Abrams’. Georgia smashed its own voting record in 2020 with 67 percent of registered voters participating, surpassing the 2008 mark of 63 percent.

In 2019, Abrams wrote that other Democrats could take advantage of the same factors as her history-making campaign, which was “fueled by record-breaking support from white voters and presidential-level turnout and support from the diverse communities of color in our state.”

“All of that foundation [Abrams built] is now what has brought this state into toss-up status for presidential races and for two Senate runoffs,” said Steve Phillips, a Democratic donor and founder of Democracy in Color, a progressive group focused on voters of color. “The blueprint she wrote in 2019 should be a roadmap for the national donor community about how to move resources over the next two months,” who are already lining up on both sides to dump millions of dollars into the race.

According to early exit polls, Biden won 29 percent of white voters, a high-water mark for a Democrat in Georgia, up from 21 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016. And an analysis of early voting data from Collective PAC, a group focused on growing Black political power, showed that nearly 370,000 Black voters who didn’t vote in 2016 or 2018 showed up in 2020, driving Black turnout higher. Collective PAC targeted that group with 2 million phone calls in the lead up to the election.

Quentin James, founder of Collective PAC, echoed that for Georgia Democrats to win, they need to drive up Black turnout and expand the electorate while seeking support from white voters. But the problem in traditional Democratic politics, James said, “is that significant resources are spent solely on peeling off white voters, and rarely invested in both strategies equally.”