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The first is more optimistic for Republicans: If Democrats couldn’t win Georgia in a historic wave election, with a top of the line recruit like Abrams and record turnout, Democrats aren’t going to be able to win a presidential election, which tend to be more competitive and partisan. In other words, 2018 was the high-water mark, and Trump will outperform Brian Kemp.

The other view that is more optimistic for Democrats: African Americans and Latinos tend to turnout in larger numbers in Presidential elections, so we can expect 2020 turnout among these groups to surpass 2018. Abrams spent a significant amount of time both before and after the race registering and mobilizing voters to turnout, and with a voter base that is increasingly more representative of the Georgia populace, Georgia will shift even further then Democrats, especially if white college educated & suburban voters continue to drift away from Republicans. In this view, Democrats have an excellent chance of making up the 1.4% they would have needed to win in 2018, and Georgia will join Arizona as America’s newest marquee swing state.

There’s one other important key in Georgia that has sadly become a growing part of politics in recent years. Governor Brian Kemp used his position as Georgia’s Secretary of State to conduct one of the most extreme voter suppression campaigns America had seen in decades as has been well documented by watch groups like the Brennan Center include:

1. 2.27 million names were removed from voter registration polls Georgia from 2012 to 2018 – and a far more then representative number of which were black.
2. Newly registered voters had their registration on hold as a result of an “exact match” law mandating that voters’ names on registration records must perfectly match their names on approved forms of identification. In implementation, 80% of the voters impacted were nonwhite.
3. Voters in Georgia had to wait longer to vote than anywhere else (2.7 times the national average) – and this problem was significantly worse in counties that were majority non-white. The wait time almost tripled from 2014, as majority nonwhite counties did not have nearly the amount of voting machines or voting locations they needed. A bipartisan analysis found that this could not be explained by higher turnout alone.

We don’t know the exact number of net voters that Abrams would have won or if it ultimately won the election for Kemp. However, in 2020, if Biden 20,000 voters that would have supported Biden can’t vote, then winning Georgia alone won’t be enough – he’ll need to win it by 20,001.

We'll see if voter supression is as successful in 2020: Voting rights groups were caught a little flat footed by the extent of voter suppression in 2018, but this time organizations like Fair Fight and the ACLU are much better funded and are aggressively challenging efforts in every state.

Politics often gets dirtier then we'd like, and both political parties have used practices they shouldn't, like gerrymandering. However, I think most Americans on both sides of the aisle can agree that voter supression is beyond the pale, and should have have remained in the dump heap of history for good after protestors literally put their lives on the lines in Selma and across the country to secure their right to vote in the 1960s.