Georgia Senate Primary
The incumbent Democratic senator Jon Ossoff, who is not being challenged in this year’s primary, is waiting to see which of three leading G.O.P. candidates he will face in the general election. Representative Mike Collins, the founder of a trucking company and a strong supporter of Donald Trump, is the front-runner. He is perhaps most famous for falsely accusing Joe Biden of having “sent the orders” for the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Collins’s main competitors are Derek Dooley, the former head coach of the football programs at Louisiana Tech and the University of Tennessee, and Buddy Carter, another Georgia congressman. Trump has declined to endorse any of the candidates; Brian Kemp, Georgia’s popular Republican governor, has endorsed Dooley.
Georgia Gubernatorial Primary
Burt Jones, the incumbent lieutenant governor, has received President Trump’s endorsement. His main challenger appears to be Rick Jackson, a little-known billionaire health-care executive, who has seen a meteoric rise in recent polls. Jackson is a former business partner of Jeb Bush’s and a major donor to Trump; he is running on pledges to “stop woke ideology” in Georgia, to freeze Georgia’s property tax, and to cut the state income tax. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and Chris Carr, the state attorney general, are also running to replace Governor Kemp, who is term-limited.
On the Democratic side, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, is the front-runner in a crowded primary. Bottoms, who served as the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement during the Biden Administration, has been endorsed by the former President and by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. She is running against Jason Esteves, a small-business owner who served in the state Senate; Michael Thurmond, the former C.E.O. of Georgia’s DeKalb County; and Geoff Duncan, Kemp’s former Republican lieutenant governor, who switched parties last year. Stacey Abrams, the Democrats’ candidate for governor in 2018 and 2022, has not endorsed any of the candidates.
