A changing electorate in Georgia

Tom Crawford writes in Georgia Trend:

In January 2001, whites made up 72.1 percent of the nearly 4 million active registered voters in Georgia while African Americans were 25.7 percent of the total. There were only 933 registered voters in the whole state who identified themselves as His-panic and 1,019 voters who identified themselves as Asian.

Over the next seven years, the number of white voters essentially remained flat – by July 2007 there were 2,884,468 whites on the voter rolls, an increase of less than 23,000 over the 2001 total.

During that same period, however, the number of black voters grew by nearly 154,000 while the number of Hispanic voters jumped from less than 1,000 to nearly 46,000 and the number of Asian voters increased by 43,000.

Voters who identified themselves as belonging to the “Other” racial category more than doubled, from 84,612 in 2001 to 170,086 in 2007.

As a result of these demographic shifts, the percentage of whites who make up the state’s voting base has dropped by more than 5 percent to the point that they now account for 66.9 percent of the registered voters. Blacks now make up 26.9 percent of the total, while Hispanics and Asians each account for about 1 percent. The number of voters classified as “Other” is now almost 4 percent.