At separate events over the past few days, contenders atop Georgia’s general election ballot pushed their campaigns ahead of the final weeks of electioneering.
With control of the U.S. Senate at stake, the two contenders attacked each other as dangerous for the country.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff called his Republican challenger, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, unfit for office because of a former Collins staffer’s reported ties to white nationalists and due to the social media posts by Collins’ son-in-law, who lives on the congressman’s property.
“A sitting congressman, currently running for Senate, hosts a neo-Nazi at his house, and that neo-Nazi produces neo-Nazi propaganda from the congressman’s house, and the congressman won’t or maybe can’t get the neo-Nazi in his house to stop producing neo-Nazi content from his house while he’s running for Senate,” Ossoff said at a rally in Athens on Sunday.
“A man who won’t take responsibility for what happens under his own roof can’t be trusted with our national affairs,” Ossoff said.
Collins said at a fundraising dinner Monday that Ossoff was unfit for office as “nothing but a trust fund kid” among “communist crazies.” He characterized Ossoff as supporting “Biden inflation,” transgender-friendly legislation and “wide open” borders allowing “all these criminals just to flood into our country and yes, harm and murder Americans.”
Collins then segued to the passage of his Laken Riley Act, the first bill signed into law by President Donald Trump after he started his second term in the White House. The legislation was a reaction to the murder of a former University of Georgia student killed on the campus by a man authorities said was in the country illegally.
U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, speaks during the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Victory Dinner at the Cobb Convention Center in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. (Caroline Newbern/Capitol Beat)
Entrepreneur Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor, took a different tack against his opponent, Keisha Lance Bottoms, while speaking after Collins at the same Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition “Victory Dinner” at the Cobb Convention Center.
Rather than mentioning his opponent, Jackson focused on a story he has often told about his childhood. He described an alcoholic mother with a sixth-grade education who worked as a waitress after his father abandoned him as an infant.
“I had seven stepfathers before I was 12 years old,” Jackson said.
He said he wound up a ward of the state in foster homes. As a young adult, he said he could not afford college and found commission work in a “personnel” job. He said he was so successful at it that he was soon able to buy the firm, which he then expanded into healthcare recruitment.
The founder, chairman and CEO of Jackson Healthcare grew wealthy enough to spend more than $100 million of his own money financing his run for governor.
In the late 2000s, Jackson said, he considered becoming a missionary, but an adviser set him on a different path, telling him that “God has given you the capability to know how to make money.”
Jackson said he provided foster children with Christian life coaches and financial support through college.
“My purpose in life since 2008 is to have kingdom impact,” Jackson said. He said he would “take care of the least of these … . “I want to show them how I got out of poverty and I want to tell them that Jesus saved me and following Jesus is the best way to help you in every regard of your life.”
Republican nominee for governor Rick Jackson speaks during the Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Victory Dinner at the Cobb Convention Center in Atlanta, Georgia, on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. (Caroline Newbern/Capitol Beat)
Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta and now Democratic nominee for governor, attacked Jackson in an interview with reporters at the Athens event with Ossoff, characterizing Jackson as a profiteer who was unconcerned about the public good.
“He doesn’t care about people in Texas. He doesn’t care about people in Alabama. He doesn’t care about people in Georgia. It is all about how he makes money for himself,” Bottoms said, according to videos provided through a partnership with C-SPAN. “He wants to continue to rig the system to benefit himself.”
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms and U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff receive applause from the crowd during a joint campaign rally at the Georgia Theatre in Athens, Georgia, on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026.(Caroline Newbern/Capitol Beat)
The campaign rhetoric came a month before early voting starts Oct. 13 and seven weeks before Election Day on Nov. 3.
Ossoff, one of the most prolific fundraisers in the U.S. Senate, has been in office since 2021 and wants to keep Georgia’s U.S. Senate delegation in Democratic hands. His fellow Democratic senator, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, has also been in office since 2021 and was reelected the next year.
Republicans have controlled the Georgia governor’s office since 2003, an era that Bottoms would like to end and that Jackson would like to extend by another four years.
CORRECTION: This article was updated to reflect that Laken Riley was a former University of Georgia student at the time of her death.
ATLANTA — Communities across Georgia that were hit hard by Hurricane Helene will begin learning in November whether they will get a share of federal relief funding earmarked for water projects.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded the state nearly $500 million to help improve water infrastructure after the hurricane. The bulk of the money, nearly $360 million, is for drinking water systems. The next largest portion, nearly $125 million, is for wastewater.
“As communities across Georgia continue to recover from the most destructive storm in state history, these funds will help accelerate that ongoing work,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement.
The funding is from the federal 2025 American Relief Act. The Georgia Environmental Finance Authority is responsible for distributing the money.
Kemp’s office said the agency will present the first group of project awards to its board of directors in November, after calling for applications last fall.
The goal is to harden water systems against flood damage. Projects that are eligible for Helene Resilience Funding are supposed to either reduce the risk of flood damage or vulnerability to it or enhance resilience.
Examples of eligible projects include relocating or replacing equipment and facilities, decentralizing wastewater systems, installing backup power and planning.
ATLANTA — Georgia collected nearly $2.5 billion in net tax revenue in August, a 3.5% increase from August 2025, extending the overall year-over-year gains recorded in July.
The August increase was driven by receipts from individual income taxes and sales taxes, according to figures released by Gov. Brian Kemp’s office this week.
Individual income tax collections rose 3.5% from a year earlier. The nearly $1.2 billion in monthly revenue from the individual income tax was up $40 million from August 2025.
The rise in individual income tax collections reversed declines in June and July.
Net sales and use tax collections of more than $866 million were up $44.6 million, or 5.4%, from August 2025.
That increase built on a year-over-year rise in sales tax receipts in July.
Likewise, the adjusted sales tax distribution to local governments continued upward, totaling $911.9 million in August. It was an increase of $81.9 million over August of last year, or 9.9%.
Revenue from some categories fell.
Corporate income tax collections declined $21.4 million year-over-year, a 53.8% fall from August 2025. The total August collection in that category was $18.4 million.
Receipts from the motor fuel tax fell $6.6 million, or 3.3%, from August 2025, while tag and title fee collections for August increased $8.3 million, or 27.4%.
The decline in motor fuel tax receipts was slightly lower than the year-over-year fall of more than $10 million in July.
ATLANTA — The Georgia Constitution gives the state broad authority to exercise police power, but the state Supreme Court clarified the extent of that authority when it comes to private property rights.
In an opinion Wednesday, the state’s high court overturned lower courts that said the state had no obligation to compensate a farming company for crop loss caused by law enforcement activity.
The case stems from a drug-interdiction operation by the Governor’s Drug Suppression Task Force in the summer of 2021.
Three police helicopters and an airplane flew so close to legal hemp crops in Dahlonega that they destroyed two rows of plants.
The owner, Blue 42 Organics, is licensed to grow hemp in Georgia. As required, the company had logged the coordinates of its operations.
But that didn’t stop the police from flying near enough to the company’s crops for the aircraft’s rotor wash and prop wash to cause an estimated $37,000 in damage.
The company sued, and the state Department of Public Safety convinced a trial court that it had no obligation to pay for the damage. The state argued that its use of police power made it “categorically exempt” from the state constitutional prohibition on the taking of private property without “just and adequate” compensation.
The trial court dismissed the case, so the company appealed. Then, the Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal.
When the state high court agreed to hear the case, the National Hemp Association filed a brief in support of Blue 42 Organics.
Hemp crops became legal after Congress passed the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. The Georgia Legislature followed with its own regulatory law.
The association said in its brief that the federal and state laws would be worthless if the Supreme Court allowed the state to inadvertently destroy hemp crops during what the brief described as “a routine aerial survey for marijuana” in the absence of an emergency.
“If state law enforcement agencies can destroy licensed hemp crops — without checking readily available licensing databases, without coordinating with the regulatory agency that issued the license, and without any obligation to compensate the farmer — then the federal-state regulatory framework that Congress and the Georgia General Assembly built is rendered meaningless,” the association’s brief said.
The outcome turned on the interplay between sovereign immunity, which shields the state from lawsuits; eminent domain, which allows the government to take land when compensating the owner; and on the extent of state police power.
The Georgia Attorney General’s office argued that the crop destruction was caused by police action rather than eminent domain, so the state did not have to compensate the owner.
That argument did not convince the high court.
The opinion, written by Chief Justice Nels S.D. Peterson, said case law allowed police to destroy private property without compensating the owner while either abating a nuisance or acting during “urgent necessity.”
But the Department of Public Safety’s motion to dismiss the case had failed to argue that either condition applied in the crop destruction, the opinion said.
Instead, the agency had argued that it was immune from being required to pay compensation through a “categorical police power exemption.”
That argument did not persuade the high court.
With all justices concurring except one who was disqualified, the Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals decision, ruling that the Department of Public Safety had failed to identify a categorical exemption that would apply to such a “routine” police action.
“The Constitution’s promise to protect private property rights would be an empty one if the State is permitted to avoid paying just compensation for taking or damaging private property merely by invoking the police power,” the opinion said.
ATLANTA — Republican Rick Jackson unveiled an expansive pitch to voters Tuesday as he campaigns against Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms to win the governor’s office.
Speaking before a small invitation-only group at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter, Jackson made five campaign promises that were broad in scope but narrow in detail.
His appearance came after Bottoms held an event at a Lawrenceville grocery store last week to unveil a plan to target the rising cost of living by encouraging local officials to waive their taxes on groceries.
The “Jackson action plan,” as he called it, goes far beyond one problem and one solution.
He reiterated the state tax-cutting plan he unveiled at an Atlanta barbershop last month: reduce income taxes by half, eliminate the tax on tips, suspend the gasoline tax during price spikes and eliminate taxes on energy for residential and small-business customers.
Jackson said at that campaign stop last month that he would pay for those tax cuts by increasing government efficiency, for instance with new computer systems, and by cutting the budget.
His new tax plan builds on something he announced last month: taking a bite out of rising local property taxes by freezing property values. On Tuesday, Jackson said he would require local governments to hold a public hearing and take a recorded vote before raising property taxes.
Rick Jackson, Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, unveiled his five-point “Jackson action plan” at the Westin Atlanta Perimeter on Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
Georgia law already requires local governments to advertise extensively and to hold three public hearings before voting to set a property tax rate that does not fall enough to offset any increase in tax proceeds caused by rising property values.
Jackson said he would attack housing costs by expediting permitting and inspections, which are largely functions of local government. He said he would ensure no data centers are approved unless they would not increase local utility costs. For the college-bound, he said he would freeze tuition, room and board at Georgia’s public colleges and technical schools.
And he said he would build on Gov. Brian Kemp’s template for Medicaid with “intelligent” expansion.
Kemp’s Pathways to Coverage program limits access by requiring participants to work, attend college, care for others or volunteer their time.
Jackson said he would expand coverage for those who earn too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid but too little to afford other coverage.
Unemployed able-bodied adults would be trained and linked to employment, he said. Meanwhile, he would discourage people from swapping private insurance for Medicaid.
“I believe every Georgian should have access to healthcare coverage or insurance,” said Jackson, who founded and operates a healthcare staffing company. “So on day one, I will close the coverage gap with intelligent Medicaid expansion. We will cover those who need it the most and keep work requirements in place for those who are able. And we will not force the 500,000 people who have subsidized private plans onto a government plan.”
Jackson said he would reduce overall medical costs by requiring “meaningful price transparency” so patients can price shop. He did not say how he would accomplish this.
He said he would pursue fraud, waste and abuse in state healthcare programs by using “modern technology.”
And he said he would use the state’s bulk-purchasing power to drive down drug and healthcare-related costs.
“Nothing is more important than making Georgia more affordable,” Jackson said. “Many Georgia families are working harder than ever and still feel like they’re falling behind. Affordability is a crisis and government needs to treat it like one.”
But Jackson also said public safety was the most important part of his plan. “Nothing else in this plan works if a family does not feel safe in its home, a child does not feel safe in walking to school, or a small-business owner is afraid to open the door,” Jackson said.
Jackson said he would end child sex trafficking and set high standards for law enforcement while providing the “right” resources. He took a dig at his opponent for her handling of public unrest when she was mayor of Atlanta.
“Keisha Lance Bottoms’ record in Atlanta offers a warning about what happens when police morale and staffing are not treated as priorities,” Jackson said. “As governor, I will make public safety a daily responsibility, not a talking point after a crisis.”
