Jon Ossoff

Of all the political battlegrounds of the Trump era, Georgia is arguably the most complex. After nearly a century of being a one-party Democratic bastion, it was dominated by Republicans for several decades before becoming decisively “purple” in 2020. In that year, Georgia narrowly gave Joe Biden its electoral votes and elected two Democratic U.S. senators, giving Democrats Senate control and a governing trifecta in Washington. A dispute over the legitimacy of that election nearly broke the state’s GOP in half. Two Republicans, Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, certified Biden’s election, infuriating Donald Trump. The then-former president tried to primary both men in 2022 and failed miserably. To this day, there’s been nothing remotely like it in GOP politics.

Now Trump is back in the Oval Office, and Kemp is term-limited. All Georgia Republicans, even Kemp, routinely pay lip service to the 47th president’s party supremacy. Last month, Raffensperger finished a poor third in the GOP gubernatorial primary. Today, Georgia Republicans will hold gubernatorial and U.S. Senate runoff elections that could shape the party and the state for years to come. It’s an all-GOP show: Former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in May, and U.S. senator Jon Ossoff was unopposed for renomination.

The GOP gubernatorial runoff contestants are Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, who served as a “fake elector” in 2020 and snagged an early Trump endorsement, and billionaire health-care executive Rick Jackson, who has set spending records in an abrasive ultra-MAGA “outsider” candidacy that took the party by surprise. The Senate runoff is between another preening MAGA champion, U.S. representative Mike Collins, and former college football coach Derek Dooley, whose own “outsider” candidacy is backed by his lifelong friend Brian Kemp.

Last weekend, as a short early-voting period wrapped up, Trump endorsed Collins’s Senate bid. Then, in a truly surprising development, Kemp endorsed Jones to become his successor.

Both these races have looked close: close enough that unpredictable bad-weather patterns on primary day could matter a lot. Collins led Dooley in the Senate primary, but Dooley seemed to have some momentum. Trump’s endorsement came too late for many early voters but boosted Collins a bit in the prediction markets. A last-minute Insider Advantage survey gave Collins a two-point lead. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein offered a common take on the significance of the Senate fight:

For some Republicans, the race amounts to a choice between two competing theories of how to prevail in purplish Georgia: energizing the GOP base or building a broader coalition.

But Trump’s endorsement of Collins on Sunday transformed it into something else: a proxy fight between Trump and Kemp.

The “struggle for the soul of the GOP” interpretation of the Senate race has been jolted by the fact that Trump and Kemp are unexpectedly on the same team in the equally red-hot gubernatorial runoff. It is hard to overstate how toxic the Jones-Jackson contest has become. Both candidates have accused each other of corruption and policy heresies, even though both of them are positioned as hard-core defenders of Trump’s legacy in Washington and regular allies of Kemp in Georgia. The fact that Kemp has had to work with Jones on legislation for the last four years (Jones was the sole Trump-backed statewide candidate to win a GOP nomination in 2022) may have made him preferable to the loose-cannon Jackson. As in the Senate race, the polls are close: Insider Advantage shows Jackson leading by one point. If Jones wins, he can probably thank both of his endorsers-in-chief.

If Dooley and Jackson win, however, Trump will likely be furious. He’s already smarting from a proxy loss in Iowa’s gubernatorial primary on June 2, blaming his political advisers for urging him to back the wrong horse.

Whoever wins will face a tough general-election contest. That’s particularly true in the Senate race, where Ossoff is building an enormous war chest as national and local assessments of his political chops steadily rise. Most polls show the incumbent leading either Republican. National Republicans will certainly do everything they can to help their nominee paint Ossoff — a Jewish liberal from Atlanta — as a “Radical Left Lunatic” and “a Dumocrat,” as Trump put it in his Truth Social post endorsing Collins.

The gubernatorial race could have slightly different dynamics, as Bottoms isn’t nearly as well known or as well financed as Ossoff. But Republicans could have their own state-specific problems stemming from the special legislative session that Kemp has called for the day after the runoff. He’s looking to undertake a fresh gerrymandering effort, enabled by the U.S. Supreme Court in its recent Louisiana v. Callais decision. Kemp refused to muck around with congressional lines before the November election. But out of fear that Bottoms might win the governorship and block a gerrymander next year, Kemp is asking the legislature to draw a new 2028 map right now (Burt Jones will preside over the Senate during this unsavory and racially charged undertaking). It will very likely be aimed at knocking out at least two of Georgia’s five Black U.S. House members. The national significance of a Georgia gerrymander is clear: Aside from the state’s reputation as the “cradle of the civil rights movement,” it has the largest Black congressional delegation (with six members) of any state.

Democrats already managed to attract higher turnout in their May primary than Republicans did in theirs. A Black-led Democratic voting surge in November could make some real history, leaving both Trump and Kemp as feeble-looking lame ducks and turning Georgia not just purple, but purple trending blue. And it could also put someone decidedly cool to the MAGA cause in the governor’s seat to supervise Georgia’s vote in 2028.