by Ty Tagami | Aug 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp threw his full support behind football coach Derek Dooley on Saturday, saying he believes the son of legendary Bulldogs coach Vince Dooley can unseat Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate next year.
“I am proud to endorse Derek Dooley, for United States Senate,” the two-term Republican governor said Saturday. “Derek is a fighter, a leader we can trust, and a true political outsider who has what it takes to defeat Jon Ossoff and make sure our state finally has a voice in the U.S. Senate that reflects our values.”
Kemp held his first public event for Dooley outside the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium before the Bulldogs routed Marshall University’s Thundering Herd 45-7.
Dooley, a political newcomer, said he hoped to bring Kemp’s conservative leadership style to Washington by beating Ossoff in November.
First, he will have to get through two GOP congressmen also competing for the GOP nomination.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump, trying to win his potent base of support in the Republican primary.
Democrats responded by attacking Dooley’s record as a former coach for the University of Tennessee, calling him “failed and fired.” They also referenced the troubled history between Kemp and Trump.
The Georgia Democrats said Kemp’s endorsement “is fanning the flames of an already chaotic GOP U.S. Senate primary and guaranteeing a showdown between himself and Trump that could be worse than Dooley’s job-ending 2012 loss to Vanderbilt.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp will promote Derek Dooley‘s bid to dislodge Democrat Jon Ossoff from the U.S. Senate by appearing with the Republican candidate Saturday before the University of Georgia game against Marshall University at Sanford Stadium.
The football coach and son of legendary Bulldogs coach and athletic director Vince Dooley formally entered the GOP primary in early August after floating the idea in June.
U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons, was the first major political figure to jump into the race followed by U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson.
Both have voting records aligned with President Donald Trump and his supporters, and Democrats have attacked them for it.
Dooley, a political newcomer, has no such record. So Democrats have been targeting his mainstream marketing, with Georgia Democratic Party Chair Charlie Bailey labeling him as a “failed and fired” former coach for the University of Tennessee.
Kemp, who is among a handful of politicians authorized by a 2021 state law to operate a “leadership committee” that can raise unlimited sums, will play on the popularity of Georgia football to help Dooley.
A spokesperson for Kemp said the governor will stand with Dooley while tailgating ahead of Saturday’s game. It will be their first public speaking engagement together for Dooley’s Senate campaign.
by Dave Williams | Aug 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – For more than a decade, supporters of legalizing gambling in Georgia have pitched casinos, pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, and – more recently – sports betting to the General Assembly but come up snake eyes.
But gaming industry lobbyists and their legislative allies believe 2026 could be different because Georgia faces several daunting financial challenges that legalized gambling could help address.
Spending cuts in the budget bill President Donald Trump steered through the Republican-controlled Congress in early July will slash billions of dollars in federal aid to states for vital services including education, health care, and social services.
Under the Gold Dome, Georgia lawmakers are considering eliminating the state income tax, which supplies more than half of the state’s revenues. There’s even a push for Georgia to join 48 other states in establishing a need-based college scholarships program.
“They all know they have to figure out a way to bring more money to Georgia,” said Rick Lackey, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based City Commercial Real Estate, who is backing several proposed casino resorts around the state. “They’ve got to find the money somewhere.”
The enthusiasm for legalizing gambling in Georgia was on full display Aug. 25 when a parade of casino and sportsbooks executives and consultants went before a state House study committee during a hearing that lasted nearly six hours.
Two legislative measures legalizing gambling in the Peach State are before the General Assembly for consideration, both covering sports betting but not casinos. House Resolution 450 is a constitutional amendment that would put sports betting before voters in a statewide referendum in November 2026, while House Bill 686 is an “enabling” bill spelling out details on how sports betting would operate in Georgia.
While the two measures made it through House committees this year, neither reached the floor of the House let alone moved to the state Senate.
Georgia lawmakers don’t have to look far for an example of sports betting. The North Carolina legislature passed a sports betting bill two years ago, which took effect last year, allowing both online betting and three retail sportsbooks.
During its first year, sports betting generated $116 million in tax revenue for the Tar Heel State, far outpacing projections, Jason Saine, a former North Carolina state representative, told members of the study committee.
“Georgia could see similar surges,” he said. “Our states are very similar. The population is very similar.”
Tennessee legalized sports betting back in 2019 but limited it to online wagering. Last year, sports betting yielded $97.1 million in tax revenue to the state, a figure projected to increase to $108.7 million this year, said Tom Lee, former vice chairman of the Tennessee Sports Wagering Council.
Saine said the North Carolina bill also legalized pari-mutuel betting on horse racing, but it has yet to take off. The horse racing industry has been on the decline in recent years due in part to animal welfare concerns.
Saine said North Carolina lawmakers decided not to include casinos in their bill, conceding casino gambling is more difficult to pass.
But casinos make a lot more money than sports betting. Slot machines and table games generated nearly $50 billion last year nationwide compared to $13.8 billion from sports betting, according to the American Gaming Association.
The more than 40 states with land-based casinos generated $16 billion in taxes in 2024, said Josh Swissman, founding partner and managing director of GMA Consulting, a leading gaming industry consultant with offices in Las Vegas and Denver.
Casinos also create a lot more jobs than sports betting. The typical casino generates about 1,700 jobs, while the larger casinos can create up to 10,000 jobs, Swissman said.
A key argument casino supporters have long used is that states without legalized betting lose tax revenue when their residents head to neighboring states that have casinos. Georgians travel north to tribal casinos in North Carolina, west to their counterparts in Alabama or south to Florida.
“Casinos serve as a great mechanism to capture consumer spending that might otherwise cross state borders to adjacent states or beyond,” Swissman said. “They also do a great job of attracting out-of-state residents with out-of-state dollars.”
A major reason legalized gambling legislation has failed to make headway in the General Assembly is opposition from faith-based groups.
Joseph D’Angelo, director of the church ambassador network for Frontline Policy Council, told the House study committee legalized gambling contributes to crime, while gambling addiction destroys families.
“Domestic violence, child neglect, bankruptcy, and crime all increase when gambling expands,” he said. “For every $1 state governments collect in gambling revenue, taxpayers spend $3 to $5 addressing the societal fallout.”
But several witnesses who testified at the Aug. 25 hearing pushed back on that argument. Jay Albanese, a criminology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said most studies have found casinos have no impact on local crime rates.
“The average age of casino patrons is 32,” he said. “These people do not commit street crimes. They are not considered to be a high-risk group.”
Jeremy Kudon, president of the Sports Betting Alliance, which includes Draft Kings, FanDuel and several other major sports betting operators, said gambling addiction rates across the U.S. have held steady at 1%, compared to 7% for alcohol addiction and 70% for those hooked on tobacco products.
Kudon said legal sportsbooks do a far better job of policing wagering than overseas illegal operators players turn to in states that don’t allow sports betting.
“They don’t care whether a customer is 21 or over,” he said. “They don’t care if the customer is on the verge of bankruptcy or addiction.”
Legalized gambling advocates also argue that supporting casinos and/or sports betting is not political suicide for state legislators.
“None of the people who supported sports betting (in North Carolina), who voted for it and were on the bill as sponsors, lost their primary or general election,” Saine said. “It wasn’t even an issue.”
Georgia lawmakers who back legalized gambling have the additional cover of arguing they are only voting indirectly on the issue. Since any move to bring casinos or sports betting to the Peach State would require a constitutional amendment, the issue ultimately would be in the hands of voters.
“This is not something that will cost (legislators) seats,” Kudon said. “Let’s give Georgians the right to choose.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Members of the Republican-controlled State Election Board offered differing views on election security Thursday when lawmakers held their third of six listening sessions around the state.
Board members also disagreed about whether there is a problem.
“We can count our votes accurately on Election Day and we can trust the results,” board Chairman John Fervier said. Last year, he said, all 5.3 million ballots were scanned by an optical reader during an audit that found only 87 discrepancies, all but one due to human error during the counting of hand-marked ballots.
“That’s an incredible result that you would hope would silence a lot of the conspiracy theorists and naysayers that cause confusion by claiming that Georgia’s elections are rigged and unfair,” said Fervier, who was appointed to the board by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.
But Janelle King, another Republican appointee on the board, pointed to problematic elections, such as one in DeKalb County in 2022 when a candidate lost election to a seat on the county commission only to win after a hand recount. Technical errors in scanners caused the initial miscount.
“Ask DeKalb Commissioner Michelle Long Spears if technology is reliable,” said King, who was appointed to the board last year by state House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican from Newington. “So, it’s not to say that technology is all bad, but to assume that technology doesn’t fail is inaccurate. And to make people who feel like technology should not be the sole purpose out to be quacks or crazy, it’s just completely absurd.”
Raffensperger’s office disagreed with King’s account, saying after the hearing that she had misrepresented what happened in the Dekalb election. Human error — “a programming issue” — caused the technology problem that caused the miscount, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office said.
“The ballots and the scanners were not synced properly. That’s user error, not the machine’s fault,” Robert Sinners said. “If I microwave something for 20 minutes and it explodes, is that the microwave’s fault?” He added that it was “so sad seeing people who have the correct information blatantly ignoring it as the alternative fits their narrative better.”
King, like several who testified at the hearing at North Georgia Technical College in Clarkesville, wants paper ballots. Paper is likely coming because the legislature outlawed the QR code readers now used by the Dominion voting machines. Georgia elections must be conducted without those digital codes starting in July.
Those pushing for change also argued that the board should get more taxpayer dollars to pay for investigators and technology systems, so it does not have to rely on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Lawmakers stripped Raffensperger of his role on the board, known as the SEB, after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s demand to find him more votes.
Brad Carver, a metro Atlanta district chairman of the state Republican Party, testified for a third time Thursday, having presented to lawmakers at both prior meetings, in Atlanta in July and in Rockmart in early August.
The election board needs more staff and its own attorney to make local election officials comply with the law and to clear a backlog of election-related complaints, said Carver, who also advocated for paper ballots.
“You have county election boards that are not following the law. They’re continuing to not follow the law. And the way that we can ensure uniform application is to have the SEB enforce that if you give them the appropriate authority,” said Carver.
His evidence of problems was a slide he showed that indicated 104% of voting-age Georgians were registered to vote. Carver did not have an answer when a Republican lawmaker on the panel asked if the number of voters in the numerator included those purged or about to be purged because they had not voted in years.
Then Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, pounced.
If 104% of eligible Georgians had voted, Carver would have brought that statistic, she said.
“That would have been a red flag of something going wrong. This in and of itself is completely explained by the inactive slash active voter process,” she said, suggesting that Carver was “fear mongering” with misleading statistics.
The meeting revealed deep personal divisions on the board, with its recently hired executive director, James W. Mills, publicly excoriating Fervier, who is technically one of his bosses.
“After almost 30 years of being in and out of the state, I’ve never served under a more dysfunctional, dishonest chairman than Chairman John Fervier,” said Mills, 62, a former state representative and member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles who has been in his new role for a few months.
Draper later called that attack embarrassing, saying she felt like she was at home managing fights between kids. She also questioned whether Mills had the requisite expertise for his new job, and he responded that nearly two decades of running for office was experience enough.
The House Election Procedures Study Committee will hold another hearing on Sept. 18 at Savannah Tech.
UPDATE: This article was amended with comment from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office
by Dave Williams | Aug 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – A federal judge Thursday dismissed a lawsuit Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr filed early this month challenging the legality of a law giving Lt. Gov. Burt Jones a leg up in the gubernatorial race between the two Republicans.
The suit claims legislation the GOP-controlled General Assembly passed in 2021 in the name of election reform gives Jones an unfair and unconstitutional advantage in next year’s Republican gubernatorial primary.
The law allows certain elected officials in Georgia – including the lieutenant governor – to form “leadership committees” that can raise unlimited amounts of money to finance campaigns. As attorney general, Carr does not have access to such a fundraising vehicle.
Thursday’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Marie Calvert held that Carr lacked legal standing to bring the case.
The Jones campaign reacted to the decision with a slap at Carr.
“If Chris is this bad at being a lawyer, why would anyone want to give him a promotion?” Jones campaign spokeswoman Kendyl Parker said.
Carr’s campaign responded by noting the ruling was technical in nature and did not deal with the merits of the attorney general’s case while hinting there may be an appeal.
“The court acknowledged that this statute gives Burt Jones an unfair and harmful advantage – the same conclusion other federal judges have reached when examining it,” Carr campaign spokeswoman Julia Mazzone said. “We are reviewing all legal options to right this wrong.”
Jones and Carr are vying for the Republican nomination to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Brian Kemp. The primary will take place next May.
