Photograph courtesy of Chris Carr
We are living in an era of seemingly endless political campaigning. Many voters were still exhausted from last November’s tumultuous presidential election when the state’s political class made a sharp turn and almost immediately began handicapping Georgia’s 2026 statewide races.
So far, three candidates have declared their intentions to run for term-limited Governor Brian Kemp’s seat. Last week, State Senator Jason Esteves became the first Democrat to officially announce his candidacy, and this week, Democrat and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms filed paperwork to begin raising money for her gubernatorial campaign.
Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr was the first candidate of either party to enter the race—and gave proof of the never-ending cycle of campaigning—when he made his official announcement just two weeks after President Donald Trump won re-election and a full two years before the 2026 statewide general election.
Carr jumped in early to get a head start on raising the millions of dollars he’ll need to win his party’s nomination. The strategy paid dividends right away. Carr’s campaign announced it had raised $2.2 million in just 40 days after his announcement, a sum they say is a record for that abbreviated length of time. We’ll have a better sense of his fundraising strength when the current fundraising reporting period ends on June 30.
But with the legislative session now over, Carr likely won’t have the Republican field to himself for much longer. Many pundits expected Lt. Governor Burt Jones—who’s seen as the early frontrunner for the nomination—to announce his candidacy within days after the end of the session. But it appears now that Jones has decided he can afford to wait. Unlike Carr, Jones has the resources to self-fund his campaign as the heir to his family’s oil business fortune. One Georgia Republican with an insider’s view of the race told me he expects the Jones family could put as much as $12 million of their own money into the Jones campaign.
Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Plus, Jones can almost certainly count on the endorsement of President Trump. He’s demonstrated his loyalty to Trump in many ways, including having joined the group of 16 so-called “alternate” Georgia electors who pledged their electoral college votes to Trump even after he lost the state to Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s support may be enough to put Jones over the top in the GOP primary race. But that won’t deter Carr or his backers, who point out that in the 2022 GOP primary, Carr won 74 percent of the vote for attorney general in a race against an opponent who Trump convinced to challenge Carr after he refused to back Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Democrats haven’t won the Georgia governor’s mansion since Roy Barnes’s victory in 1998. And while Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won U.S. Senate seats in 2021, and Democrats have made inroads into the GOP majority in the legislature, the governor’s office remains a daunting challenge.
With that concern in mind, many Democrats see their race for governor as still wide open, especially after well-regarded Congresswoman Lucy McBath announced she was withdrawing from the race to care for her husband, who is battling cancer. Jason Carter, the 2014 Democratic candidate for governor and grandson of President Jimmy Carter, has also made it clear he won’t run again.
Nevertheless, a number of Democratic officials say they are heartened by the 41-year-old Esteves’ entry into the race. A former teacher, he became the first Latino member of the Atlanta Board of Education and went on to chair the Board. An attorney and business owner, his ability to raise the vast amount of money needed to win the governor’s mansion and his lack of name recognition statewide will be tests he’ll have to overcome.
Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Bottoms will be judged largely on her tenure as Atlanta mayor. On one hand, she was seen as unusually combative, especially in her relationship with Governor Kemp. They battled over Kemp’s relaxed COVID-19 restrictions and their vastly different approaches to handling Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city in 2020. Some voters will remember that Bottoms hastily withdrew from running for re-election just days after winning President Biden’s endorsement for a second term. But Bottoms was a popular figure among Black women voters, who are crucial to any Democratic hope of winning the governor’s race. And she’ll look to raise money from the network of national Democrats she came to know during her work in the Biden White House after leaving the mayor’s office.
Two other high-profile Democrats have yet to be heard from: Will Stacey Abrams try for a third time to become governor? In 2022, she was such a powerful force in the party that no Democrat dared to jump into the governor’s race until Abrams had declared her intentions. It’s notable that this year, even though Abrams hasn’t ruled out another run, no one is waiting for her to make up her mind this time around. If she does make a third run, this time she’ll have to fight hard to win the nomination. A number of Democrats have openly acknowledged they feel “Abrams fatigue.”
Photograph courtesy of Michael Thurmond
And what will former DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond choose to do? Thurmond has a long, distinguished career in elected and appointed office in Georgia. In 1986, he became the first Black candidate since Reconstruction to be elected to the General Assembly. He won statewide election as state labor commissioner and later was hired as the interim superintendent to turn around DeKalb County’s failing school system. Thurmond says he’s continuing to travel the state to talk to voters on his listening tour. He thinks a Democrat can win but admits there’s a very narrow path to victory for any Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
All of this simply means we have a very long election season ahead of us. There will be twists and turns, some breathless reporting, and no doubt a few surprises here and there that will remind us that watching politics is one of Georgia’s most enduring pastimes.
Bill Nigut has covered Georgia politics for more than 40 years, working as a reporter at Channel 2 News and at GPB as the host of Political Rewind. Most recently, he was a cohost of Politically Georgia for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WABE.
