Atlanta, GA - February 6th 2024: Governor Brian Kemp participates in a interview, after a legislative breakfast held by the GHCC.
Maybe what happened in Tuesday’s election was an anomaly. You could certainly make that case, as many Georgia Republicans have tried to do.
It was, after all, an odd-year election, with relatively low turnout, for two low-profile statewide races. So even if the resulting margins were spectacular – Democrats won two seats on the five-member Public Service Commission, both by 25 percentage points – maybe it was just an anomaly.
Joe Biden’s 2020 victory in the red state of Georgia was another such anomaly, so rare and unusual that to this day, Donald Trump refuses to accept that it happened.
Raphael Warnock’s victory in a special election runoff in 2021, making him the first Black Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from the South, was also an anomaly, as was Sen. Jon Ossoff’s runoff win that year. Georgia hadn’t had a Democratic senator in almost 20 years, but suddenly we had two in the same year, so surely that too was just a fluke, the result of a rare confluence of political events at the national level that is unlikely to be repeated here in Georgia.
Of course, Warnock then won re-election in 2022. Was that too just an anomaly, a one-time event explained away by the GOP’s mistake in running Herschel Walker, a man who made his name on the football field, as its candidate? It’s not as if Georgia Republicans would ever repeat that unforced error, right? They would never again try to nominate someone else whose only qualification was football fame, someone like Derek Dooley?
No, they would never.
But anomalies are funny things. Considered in isolation, they might not mean much. But when you get a string of them, one anomaly after another, they cease to be anomalies at all. They become a trend.
We also have other anomalies to consider. For example, today we have a former Republican lieutenant governor who has switched parties and is now running for governor as a Democrat. That’s pretty rare, right? When was the last time a party-switcher actually ran for governor and won?
Well, Sonny Perdue did it in 2002. That was an anomaly, until Nathan Deal did it again in 2010. The anomalies became a trend.
We also have MAGA queen Marjorie Taylor Greene, representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, who is suddenly and loudly condemning her own party’s leadership. She is slamming it for its failure to reopen the government and for its failure to address a looming crisis in health insurance affordability. In a startling appearance this week on The View, where Greene was greeted warmly by the liberal hosts, she called the GOP’s performance “embarrassing.”
My mother, who lives out of state, is a big fan of The View.
“What the heck happened to that woman?” Mom asked me this week. “Did she get struck by lightning or something?”
“No, Mom. I think it was space lasers. Or maybe chemtrails.”
The easy, short-term conclusion from all this is that Democrats have momentum going into the 2026 midterms, both here in Georgia and nationwide. While I think that’s true, something deeper and more profound is also going on.
A generation is finally ceding power that it has clung to for too long, necessary because we face new problems that our elders do not comprehend. The political establishments of both parties are crumbling, and frustration with government has become so profound that Americans of all ideologies find themselves open to solutions that previous generations had rejected. In a recent YouGov poll, for example, just 13% of Americans said they approved of how Congress is performing, and that’s just not sustainable. Change is coming, and fast.
What we see happening in Georgia, then, is just a small part of what’s happening nationally, globally. Coalitions are breaking apart, and new ones will be forming. Old ways of understanding are being tossed aside. As structures and systems are torn down, new ones must rise to replace them.
Trump and MAGA offer one such alternative, one they apparently intend to impose by force if necessary. Tuesday’s results offer us hope that other alternatives will emerge and prove more viable, but in a world where everything seems an anomaly, who the hell knows.
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.