I moved away from South Carolina to Georgia thinking it couldn't possibly be worse. After all, Georgia is a competitive state, with high-profile races for governor and the US House. Surely, surely, there would be fewer unopposed elections here, of all Deep South states.
Oh how wrong I was.
70 of the 180 seats in the Georgia State House of Representatives saw contests of any sort - just over a third. Similarly, 22 of the 56 State Senate districts saw challengers. Astonishingly, this is an improvement on 2016, when only 13 Senate and 32 House districts had more than one candidate. Those seats that actually saw elections tended to be very competitive, with 17 seats in the house probably changing hands - 11 from the Republicans to the Democrats, plus four more where the Democrats lead in but are yet to be called, all in the Atlanta metro, but two seats in Athens (the 117th and 119th districts) won by the Democrats in special elections narrowly returning to Republican hands. 2 northern Atlanta Senate seats also flipped to the Democrats. Some of these swings were huge - some necessarily, because one of the state senate seats and five of the state house seats returned Republicans unopposed in 2016, others as a consequence of good campaigning. Of note were the eleven point swing in the 40th Senate district and the twelve-point swing in the 54th House district.
These pickups were concentrated overwhelmingly in the 6th and 7th House districts. The white-majority 6th was the home of the most-expensive ever special election last year, when Jon Ossoff, probably grown in a lab somewhere to be the DNC's ideal White Moderate Suburban Candidate, failed to gain the seat by a few percentage points, but has now been gained by Lucy McBath, an African-American gun control activist. Create your own arbitrary narrative about what this means for Democratic presidential candidates in 2020. In next-door's 7th, now only a white plurality seat, Republican incumbent Rob Woodall leads Professor Carolyn Bourdeaux by only 900 votes and the race is still yet to be called. All in all, these results are a real sign of the meteoric shift in the Atlanta Metro - the aforementioned 6th and 7th districts voted for Romney by over 20 points and for Trump by two and seven points respectively. The good news for the Democrats wasn't limited entirely to Atlanta, however, seeing big swings towards them in the suburban Savannah 164th district, the rural south-western 151st and 154th districts, located within Sanford Bishop's congressional district, and the 147th district in Warner Robins, as well as the two aforementioned Athens districts which returned to the Republicans. All this on a house map that was partially redrawn in 2015 and a senate map in 2014 to try and shore up potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents in the Atlanta metro - and with yet another House redistricting plan currently proposed.
With the breaking of the Senate supermajority, substantial gains in the House and a potential pickup in the Secretary of State race, which would neutralize the frankly banana-republic levels of shenanigans committed by until-very-recently incumbent Brian Kemp, who is also the probably-successful Republican candidate for governor, the Democrats have reason to feel good about the future in Georgia, but the map looks very, very different to when Clinton narrowly carried the state in 1992. Whether the Democrats can consolidate their Atlanta gains in 2020 is going to be one of the many, many interesting questions of that election cycle.