ATLANTA — As Republicans move to upend Georgia’s election laws, progressive voter organizers are looking at a new electorate that “bodes well for the future of Georgia’s elections.”

When Democrats won both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia and President Joe Biden carried the state, many were shocked but voter engagement gurus quickly suggested the Democratic successes did not happen overnight. And after the 2020 election cycle, they said, the work is far from finished.

Organizers look to build on the momentum of the consequential presidential and U.S. Senate races that rocked the political climate in the Deep South. Both contests saw historic numbers of ballots cast, increases in registered voters and record participation in Black and other communities of color.

The Jan. 5 runoffs that sent U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock to Congress and solidified a Democratic majority in the upper chamber even saw thousands of voters who didn’t vote in November cast ballots in the races where runoffs usually see significant drop-off.

“The work of flipping Georgia in the first place, showed people that it was possible,” Nse Ufot, executive director of voter engagement group The New Georgia Project, told CNHI.

Georgia’s Republican legislators have turned their attention to a flurry of restrictive voting measures under the Gold Dome that advocates suspect are retaliation against Democratic wins in the state. The measures specifically target mail-in voting that pushed their Blue opponents ahead in many of the races.

But the GOP is up against a shifting political atmosphere in the Peach State. Young voters and voters of color showed significant enthusiasm at the polls that isn’t likely to go away. Atlanta suburbs, once dominated by a white electorate, are now a hot bed for diverse voter growth.

New generations of voters, advocates hope, will usher in a new generation of progressive candidates and elected officials at all levels of government.

In southwest Georgia’s Randolph County — an area made up of more than 60% Black and brown residents — nearly all voters who cast ballots in November went back to the polls in January. The Black Belt county was among the rural areas devastated by the pandemic and lost its local hospital just before the general election.

Ufot said Black rural voters like the ones in Randolph “understood the weight of their vote.”

“Southwest Georgia, Albany and surrounding areas, the Black Belt has been the hardest hit — it’s one of our original COVID hot spots,” she said. “Instead of responding with despair, Black voters came out at almost 100% of their November turnout to vote for the kind of Georgia —the kind of country — that they want to live in.”

Black voters’ high turnout levels — in both rural and urban communities — helped propel Democrats to statewide victories. Young voters, too, boosted Democratic candidates.

According to the New Georgia Project, 188,000 Gen Z voters in Georgia backed President Biden over Donald Trump.

“That bodes well for the future of Georgia’s elections,” Ufot said.

Clayton County, in the heart of former Congressman John Lewis’ district, gained national attention when its votes pushed Biden ahead in the presidential contest. Both Democratic U.S. Senate candidates made multiple visits to the county to rally in the party’s stronghold.

Alaina Reaves, president of the Clayton County Young Democrats, said that while it was no surprise Clayton County voted Democratic, the increased turnout solidified its impact on the election.

“People are energized,” she said. “I think people came out to vote and they saw that their vote made a difference.”

Asian American voters in Georgia were among those who helped elect the country’s first Asian American vice president — Kamala Harris — who is also the first female and Black individual to hold the second highest office in the United States.

There are more than 300,000 registered Asian American voters in Georgia — a number that grew by 100,000 from 2016 to 2020. Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, executive director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, said the growth and subsequent impact on elections will not stop.

“As our communities have grown, the voting population, too, has grown,” she said. “More people are becoming citizens and organizations that we work with are actively registering new voters when they become citizens and helping them to understand that their civic engagement is important not just for them, but also for people who are not yet citizens.”

The Asian American Advocacy Fund executed an extensive field operation to engage with the diverse group of voters that speaks many different languages. When door knocking resumed ahead of the runoffs, the group sent volunteers who spoke different languages to voters’ doorsteps.

“That was incredibly successful. We were able to turn out voters who didn’t turn out in November, but showed up in January, because we were able to reach them and talk to them,” she said. “Not just talk to them in English, but we were able to bring Korean-speaking volunteers to the doors of Korean voters.”

Harris paid a visit to Gwinnett County during the election cycle — which has the largest population of Asian Americans in the state. Asian Americans made up about 3% of Georgia’s voters in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. In races with slim margins, every vote counts.

“I think the big change that we’ve noticed is that for the first time, a lot more of our community members are willing to more proudly align themselves with a candidate or a party in a way that we never really saw before,” Yaqoob Mahmood said.

Despite historic wins for Democrats in statewide races, Republicans still hold the majority in both chambers of the Georgia General Assembly and state official seats. With that majority, Georgia’s GOP lawmakers are pushing new laws that would restrict access to the ballot for many Georgias by especially voters of color, advocates say.

Mobilizers are aiming to recruit young and diverse candidates to run for municipal and statehouse races — an effort to start gaining more control at a local and state level.

“To build a new generation of progressive elected officials,” Ufot said. “… We’re going to focus on the same demographics — young people, people of color, women and femmes, rural Georgians and new Americans — but we’re going to focus on a different set of races this year.”

Dr. Charles Bullock III, professor of political science at University of Georgia, said while Georgia’s changing electorate garnered attention after the 2020 election cycle, the trends have been there for politicians to see for more than a decade.

In summer 2011, House Speaker David Ralston had the professor address the House majority caucus about the growing diversity of Georgia voters.

With increased diversity of voters, he said, Georgia elected officials are likely to become more diverse. There are five Asian American legislators in the General Assembly. Not long ago, Bullock said, there weren’t any.

“The trends have been underway for a long time,” he said.

Reaves, in Clayton County, said that she is confident that Georgia will continue to see increased diversity in its elected officials.

“It truly shows that the Georgia demographics have been changing for for years,” she said. “And now we’re actually having state legislators that reflect those demographic changes.”