They may not know it, but the kids growing up today in the outlying counties around Atlanta or Nashville or Charlotte fit within a very narrow demographic.

According to recent mid-decade estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, the South far outpaced the rest of the country in population growth over the years from 2020 to 2025. Out of a batch of statistics, one in particular stands out: the South was the only region of the country where the under-18 population didn’t decline significantly. That means the children born in this region still outnumbered those aging out into early adulthood, or deceased far too young.

In the West, the under-18 population declined by 5.7 percent, in the Northeast by 4.1 percent and in the Midwest by 3.9 percent. In the South, the under-18 population grew by a modest but meaningful 1.1 percent.

Breaking the data down further, the outlying counties around large Southern metro areas had by far the fastest growth among the age groups likely to begin families, and therefore the nation’s only growing under-18 population.

Meanwhile, the growth in the 65-and-older population soared across the board during the first half of this decade. Broken down by age and region, this data indicates the varied impact this massive demographic shift has had on different parts of the country.

Georgia finds itself in an interesting — and changing — place within this growing region. It’s next door to the fastest-growing state in the country, but if you’re thinking that’s Florida, you’re in the wrong decade. The fastest-growing state is now South Carolina, and the fastest-growing county in the country is Jasper County, South Carolina, formerly looked on as a wide spot on Highway 17 on the way into Savannah.

For some time, demographers have been predicting Georgia would at some point in this decade become the second southern state after Texas to become majority-minority— an awkward term which means no racial group has a majority of the vote. In the 2020 census, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites had dropped to 50.1 percent.

Data released last month showed that in the five years since that census, Georgia’s overall population increased by more than half a million, while the non-Hispanic white population decreased by a net of about 25,000. There’s no longer any question about when Georgia becomes a majority-minority state. The changes over this decade have definitively put that to rest.

According to the census data and an analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 40 percent of the newcomers are Hispanic, dispersed widely over the state, 33 percent are African-American, centered in the south Metro Atlanta counties, and 20 percent are Asian, centered in the north Metro Atlanta counties.

This has huge political implications — or not, depending on which group in this increasingly diverse state you’re talking about, and when you expect these new residents to become voters and have an impact. Demographic inevitability has not proven to be a very reliable guide to election results in the short term. Over the long run, however, demographics do matter.

When you put the latest estimates about population growth in the South generally beside estimates about the demographics of growth in Georgia, some interesting points emerge. There’s a tendency to think of “the outlying counties around large Southern metro areas” that are growing so fast as basically white, as they would have been a few decades ago.

But in Georgia these are the counties around Atlanta that are showing the most African-American and Asian growth. And while the data comparing counties across the South doesn’t break out racial data, there’s a clear link between population loss in Southern rural counties generally and the decline in white population in Georgia specifically.

These new estimates point to a future in which the South plays an increasingly important role, with a very diverse Georgia at its center.

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