American Local Elections Study · 2025

Atlanta

What city residents think about local government and what they want it to do.

Viewing Results From:

In 2025 the Local Politics Lab conducted a national survey of 2,346 adults, along with post-election surveys of 5,517 adults in 33 cities and counties holding local elections to capture how the public views important issues facing their community. We asked respondents about their perceptions of local services and their elected leaders, along with their views on a variety of topics including housing, policing, immigration, and election timing. Here we report findings from the 190 respondents from Atlanta, Georgia.

Key Findings
65percentapprove of Mayor Andre Dickens’s performance
36percentrate the cost of housing in Atlanta as below average or poor
63percentsay people like them have a great deal or fair amount of say in local government
60percentsupport moving Atlanta’s local elections to even-numbered years

Approval of elected officials

Majorities approve of the performance of Mayor Andre Dickens and Atlanta City Council. Majorities also approve of the performance of Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat and District Attorney Fani Willis.

Grades for local services

When asked to grade different aspects of their local community, Atlanta respondents give the highest grades to local schools, with 44 percent calling them excellent or above average. Respondents give the cost of housing the lowest grade. Renters are more likely than homeowners to give the cost of housing a below-average or poor grade: 43 percent of renters do so, compared with 29 percent of homeowners. This difference may reflect renters’ more direct exposure to current market rents.

Across the country, local institutions like schools and policing tend to receive the highest grades from the public, while broader economic conditions, especially the cost of housing, receive the worst.

Attribution and accountability

Federal, state, and local government agencies share responsibility for setting policies and delivering services that affect quality of life in Atlanta. This division of responsibility can make it difficult for the public to correctly assign credit or blame to local officials for policy decisions they make.1 Across different levels of government, respondents identify Atlanta city government as most responsible for traffic and crime, while they perceive the state government as being most responsible for roads, police, zoning, and housing costs. Respondents most often assign responsibility for schools to the county government.

Although local governments have considerable discretion over many public services, the public may struggle to attribute policy outcomes to local elected leaders.

Government spending and revenue

To gauge budget priorities, the survey asked whether local governments should spend more, less, or about the same amount in eleven areas. Healthcare draws the strongest support for increased spending, at 68 percent. The largest partisan divides are over roads spending: 67 percent of Democrats favor increased spending, compared with 45 percent of Republicans, a difference of 22 percentage points.

Support for increased spending is substantially higher than support for increasing sources of government revenue. Income taxes draw the most support for an increase at 29 percent, and 31 percent of Atlanta respondents want property taxes cut.

Most Americans want more spending by local governments on education, housing, and healthcare, but do not support raising taxes.

Crime and policing

Atlanta respondents are more likely to perceive that crime has increased nationally than in their own neighborhoods. Twenty-four percent say crime increased in their neighborhood over the past year, while 47 percent say it increased in the country as a whole.

National debates over policing and public safety have changed substantially since 2020. Following the murder of George Floyd and nationwide protests, many state and local governments placed limits on police use-of-force and instituted new requirements concerning body cameras, officer certification, and misconduct reporting. Progressive prosecutors also sought to address concerns over mass incarceration at the local level by declining to prosecute nonviolent misdemeanors.2 In more recent years, concerns about violent crime, shoplifting, and public disorder have helped fuel backlash against some of these reforms. Some police reforms, including requirements that officers wear body cameras, receive broad support in Atlanta. Support is lower for reducing the size of the local police force or limiting the types of crimes that are prosecuted.

Questions about the federal role in public safety became especially prominent in 2025 as the Trump administration deployed the National Guard and other military personnel in several American cities, including Los Angeles and Washington D.C. While a majority of Atlanta respondents say that responsibility for crime and policing lies primarily with state and local government, they report notable support for these types of federal deployments. Forty-two percent of Atlanta respondents agree that the military should participate in fighting crime in American cities, and 59 percent support bringing federal troops to Atlanta to address crime.

Despite declines in the national crime rate, a majority of Americans say that crime across the country has increased. Far fewer say crime has increased in their own community.

Housing and land use

In many American cities roughly three-quarters of residentially zoned land is reserved for detached single-family homes, a restriction that limits where apartments can be built and that is widely linked to housing shortages and higher costs.3 Seventy-nine percent of Atlanta respondents favor allowing multifamily housing throughout the city rather than limiting it to areas that are already densely developed, which is higher than support among Americans as a whole (66 percent).

Rent regulation has returned to the political agenda in a number of places, with attempts to freeze rents or otherwise limit rent increases in New York City, Massachusetts, and California.4 Perhaps due in part to the low grades Atlanta receives for the local cost of housing, 73 percent of Atlanta respondents favor limiting how much landlords can raise rent each year. This policy is popular among both renters (67 percent in favor) and homeowners (80 percent in favor).

Transportation

Local transportation policy often involves tradeoffs among drivers, transit riders, pedestrians, and cyclists. Sixty-one percent of Atlanta respondents support the installation of new bus-only lanes to improve bus reliability, even if they reduce the space dedicated to driving and parking. Seventy-eight percent favor subsidizing transit for low-income riders. While some jurisdictions have reduced or eliminated minimum parking requirements,5 72 percent of respondents favor increasing parking requirements for new housing. Such requirements can increase construction costs, particularly when they require structured or underground parking, and may reinforce automobile-oriented development.

Most respondents say the city should prioritize pedestrian safety over increasing speed limits.

Immigration enforcement

Immigration policy received considerable attention in 2025 as federal agents carried out far-reaching immigration raids at workplaces, courthouses, and homes across the United States. As part of this effort, the Trump administration has attempted to place substantial pressure on local governments to abandon existing policies that limit when local police may assist immigration authorities.

Large majorities in Atlanta express support for federal policies that would allow immigrants already living in the United States to remain and obtain legal status. Seventy-two percent favor letting people brought to the United States illegally as children stay and work here, 72 percent favor a path to citizenship for immigrants already in the country, and 51 percent favor building a wall on the border with Mexico.

At the local level, 55 percent of Atlanta respondents favor letting local law enforcement cooperate with federal immigration authorities to deport people who are in the country illegally, while 45 percent either oppose the policy or did not express an opinion.6

Majorities support pro-immigrant policies at the federal level, while views on local cooperation with immigration enforcement are more divided.

Elections and representation

Perceived influence over local decision-making is a core indicator of civic efficacy and institutional responsiveness. In Atlanta, 63 percent of respondents say people like them have a great deal or a fair amount of say in what their local government does.

Election timing can affect who participates in local elections, and consequently whose preferences are reflected in the electorate. Research finds that local elections like those in Atlanta, which are held separately from federal elections, generally attract lower turnout and produce less representative electorates.7 Sixty percent favor moving Atlanta’s local elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years, which would place them on the same general-election calendar as federal elections.

Seventy-five percent agree that what happens in Washington shapes how they think about local issues in Atlanta. This perception is consistent with research documenting the increasing influence of national politics on local and subnational political behavior.8

Methodology

This report presents results from the 2025 wave of the American Local Elections Study, a project of the Local Politics Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School directed by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner. Data were collected by PureSpectrum, an online opt-in panel provider, with quota sampling within each surveyed jurisdiction. Interviews were conducted online between November 6 and December 15, 2025, following the November 4, 2025 local elections. The target population for this report is adults living in Atlanta; 190 respondents completed the survey. Data are weighted to population estimates for the jurisdiction from the 2023 5-year American Community Survey based on age, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, and sex. The margin of error for the Atlanta sample is +/- 8.4 percentage points at 95 percent confidence.

Footnotes

  1. Sances, Michael W. 2017. “Attribution Errors in Federalist Systems.” The Journal of Politics 79 (4): 1286-1301. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26551087↩︎

  2. Mitchell, Ojmarrh, and Nick Petersen. 2025. “The Rise of Progressive Prosecutors in the United States: Politics, Prospects, and Perils.” Annual Review of Criminology 8. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-111523-122427↩︎

  3. Bipartisan Policy Center. “What Are Zoning and Land-Use Regulations and How Do They Affect Housing Supply?” https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/what-are-zoning-and-land-use-regulations-and-how-do-they-affect-housing-supply/↩︎

  4. On the New York rent freeze see https://www.nbcnewyork.com/new-york-city/nyc-rent-freeze-stabilized-apartments/6518338/; on the Boston petition see https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/08/boston-city-council-approves-rent-control-proposal and https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/07/29/mass-rent-control-housing-advocacy; on California Proposition 33 see https://calmatters.org/politics/2024/11/california-election-results-prop-33-rent-control/.↩︎

  5. Grabar, Henry. 2024. “How Parking Reform Is Helping Transform American Cities.” Yale Environment 360, January 31. https://e360.yale.edu/features/free-parking-reform↩︎

  6. These results should be interpreted with caution because views on sanctuary city policies are sensitive to question wording; see https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/feb/24/anatomy-statistic-do-80-percent-americans-oppose-s/.↩︎

  7. Hajnal, Zoltan L., Vladimir Kogan, and G. Agustin Markarian. 2022. “Who Votes: City Election Timing and Voter Composition.” American Political Science Review 116 (1): 374-383.↩︎

  8. de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin, Daniel Naftel, John Sides, and Christopher Warshaw. “Nationalization in Local Elections.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP26-006, July 2026. https://jdbk.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum4201/files/2026-07/Nationalization_Paper_260716.pdf↩︎