Newcomers change face of Republican bastions

Georgia

AT first blush, this bedroom city of 83,000 half an hour's drive north of Atlanta might be mistaken for the perfect example of a white-flight Sun Belt suburb. It sits squarely in the congressional district once represented by Newt Gingrich, with excellent public schools and master-planned communities so pristine that they could have been built by a model train aficionado.

In 2015, the all-white City Council rejected the idea of expanding public transit out from majority-black Atlanta on the grounds that it "would increase high-density housing".