Our friends across the Tennessee border in Georgia go to the polls Tuesday to choose candidates for this fall’s general election.
If you thought you’d already been seeing television commercials for a while on the state’s Republican gubernatorial primary contenders, it’s a long, long way to November. And, should no candidate get a majority of the votes in today’s race — which is likely — the advertising is only going to intensify before the June 16 runoff.
Ultimately, this fall, Georgians will determine if they are the state that elected two Democrats to the United States Senate in runoffs weeks after President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential race, or the state that gave the Republican Trump a fairly comfortable (2.2 percentage points) win in the 2024 presidential contest.
Of course Trump is not on the ballot in this election, but you can be sure Republican primary winners will stick to him like Velcro and Democratic winners will attempt to tie the election to every Trump faux pas they can name.
The top prizes are the U.S. Senate seat now held by Democrat Jon Ossoff, one of the two who won his seat in the runoffs following the 2020 presidential election, and the open seat for governor being vacated by the popular, term-limited Brian Kemp.