ATLANTA — After another chaotic election cycle, the status quo held in Georgia.
Gov. Brian Kemp fended off both Stacey Abrams and Donald Trump to win another term, and almost every other statewide Republican notched hefty victories. Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock’s runoff win, meanwhile, solidifies Georgia as a battleground.
At the dawn of 2023, Georgia is poised for another big political year.
Kemp and Warnock aren’t just the two most powerful politicians in Georgia — they’re now bona fide national figures. New state leaders must find their footing, while Democrats search for a potentially different path forward after demoralizing losses.
Here are some of the biggest questions in Georgia that your Atlanta Journal-Constitution team will be watching this year:
Will Donald Trump face criminal charges for trying to overturn Georgia’s election?
It might sound hyperbolic that some legal analysts are already calling the possibility that Trump could face prosecution for his attempt to reverse his defeat in Georgia a potential “trial of the century.”
But if Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis decides to prosecute Trump and his allies on charges that they criminally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election, the fate of the former president would be on the line as he wages a comeback bid.
Some legal experts already view the Fulton County investigation as the greatest legal threat to Trump among the growing number of probes targeting his actions. A lengthy report by the Brookings Institution said he faces “substantial” legal risk for his actions.
Some of the focus is on the January 2021 phone call between Trump and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. During that call, Trump badgered the GOP election official to “find” enough votes to reverse his narrow defeat.
But the investigation also includes Trump’s efforts to pressure other state officials, Georgia GOP Chair David Shafer’s plan to devise a slate of fake electors, and attempts by Trump allies John Eastman, Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani to subvert the results.
Willis has won a string of legal cases to secure the testimony of Trump allies and others with crucial testimony for the special grand jury’s probe, which could conclude within a few weeks.
That’s when jurors will draft a report recommending whether prosecutors should seek charges against the former president and his allies. But the final decision rests with Willis, who has quickly become one of the state’s leading legal figures.
How will Georgia’s top politicians navigate their rising national profiles?
Gov. Brian Kemp and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock have conflicting views on just about every issue. But both were able to appeal to middle-of-the-road voters to win reelection and cement themselves as national figures.
Now they have an outsized role in one of the nation’s most important political battlegrounds, and their every decision will be magnified beyond Georgia as the race for the White House heats up.
Kemp hasn’t said much about his second-term agenda beyond calls for $2 billion worth of tax refunds and modest proposals involving education and public safety. That’s because he didn’t need to during the campaign, when he defeated Abrams by nearly 8 points.
Now armed with a clear mandate he couldn’t claim four years ago, along with a largely agreeable GOP-controlled Legislature, Kemp can pursue expansive “legacy” legislation of the sort that his predecessors championed. Or he could keep his agenda relatively simple.
Warnock must navigate a closely divided chamber with a spotlight trained more firmly on him, amid pressure to placate the many liberals who cast ballots for him five times over the past two years along with swing voters wooed by his commitment to bipartisanship.
And both stand to benefit from President Joe Biden’s attempt to make Georgia an early primary state, which would heighten the importance of their endorsements.
Will Georgia’s new legislative leaders find their footing?
For more than a decade, House Speaker David Ralston was a constant at the Capitol — a moderating influence, if not a moderate, amid a Gold Dome full of ambitious legislators keen on knee-jerk reactions.
He formed a trio with Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan the past four years that shaped the state’s agenda during the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic crunch.
Duncan’s retirement and Ralston’s death in November left the state without two key members of the triumvirate in 2023.
Both will be succeeded by well-known, but largely untested, leaders.
Jon Burns, who is set to wield the speaker’s gavel, was a Ralston ally who has pledged to maintain his style of no-frills conservative leadership. He kept Ralston’s staff on board as an indication of his agenda.
Incoming Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a former state senator endorsed by Trump, was ostracized by Duncan and his allies through much of the past two years. Duncan stripped him of his chairmanship and declined to endorse him in the general election.
How they deal with their own fractious GOP caucuses — along with Democrats who will seek to challenge major Republican priorities — will shape the session. As one lawmaker put it: “The key question is: Who can move a bill and who can kill a bill?”
Where do Georgia Democrats go from here?
For much of the past decade, Abrams’ vision for attracting Democrats reigned supreme in Georgia.
She made a case that by embracing liberal issues and mobilizing irregular voters, Democrats could both energize the base and woo swing voters. Talk of moderate stances or steering clear of national Democrats was seen as “Republican lite” fence-straddling.
But this election cycle put her approach in the crosshairs. Despite record-shattering fundraising, Abrams was walloped by Kemp and most other contenders on the party’s ticket also lost by hefty margins.
The only Democrat left standing was Warnock, who campaigned with a different strategy. He kept Biden at arm’s length, hardly mentioned Abrams on the campaign trail and talked more about working with Republican lawmakers than liberal policies.
That helped Warnock reach a significant bloc of middle-of-the-road voters who also supported Kemp. The governor’s pollster found that independent voters backed Kemp by 10 points — and supported Warnock over Herschel Walker by a 19-point edge.
Where do Democrats go from here? Most say the party should endeavor a dual strategy of appealing to core liberal supporters and swing voters, but that takes a bevy of resources and candidates that can pull off the balancing act.
Many of the party’s leading figures stress that the lessons of Warnock’s win shouldn’t be neglected as Democrats prepare for an intense 2024 election and the wide-open 2026 statewide races that follow.
“The Democratic Party must be a party that reaches out to all people. Period,” said Jason Carter, the party’s nominee for governor in 2014. “Warnock shows this can lead to victory, and it’s also just right.”
How will Georgia start to shape the 2024 field?
If Biden and state Democrats have their way, Georgia voters will play a consequential role in shaping the race for the White House.
The president stunned Democratic officials in late 2022 by outlining a new presidential primary schedule that catapults Georgia into the first wave of states to decide the party’s nominee. And Democrats are circling Atlanta as a finalist for the party’s 2024 convention.
State Republicans must still sign off on the shakeup, an uncertain prospect that must be negotiated with Kemp and national Republicans. But Kemp and his allies might have reason to agree, if only to strengthen the GOP’s influence in a wide-open race.
Either way, party leaders figure that Georgia will continue to catch attention from White House contenders after long being relegated to an afterthought for much of the past two decades.
Biden and Trump were divided by fewer than 12,000 votes in Georgia in 2020, and the state’s 16 Electoral College votes are an important part of a presidential road map that will run through Georgia and a handful of competitive states.
