ATLANTA — With weeks to go before Georgia’s primary election, nearly all the leading candidates for governor attended a forum Tuesday in hopes of distinguishing themselves from their competitors.
Only Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat and former Atlanta mayor, skipped the event at The Battery Atlanta hosted by the Georgia Association of Manufacturers.
Republicans Chris Carr, Brad Raffensperger, Burt Jones and Rick Jackson delivered messages about their support for industry. So did Democrats Derrick Jackson, Michael Thurmond, Jason Esteves and Geoff Duncan, while also calling for more government spending, especially in health care.
Duncan, who was a Republican when he was Georgia’s lieutenant governor, switched parties after clashing with President Donald Trump over the 2020 election. He said his transition away from the GOP had enlightened him on a Democratic “toolkit” that could be expensive while also helping millions. As governor, he said he would be “looking for opportunities to stop ignoring poverty,” using the state’s ample reserves to help pay for pre-kindergarten, assistance for the poor and Medicaid expansion.
He acknowledged the financial advantage of two of the leading candidates on the Republican side.
“Rick Jackson and Burt Jones are having to light $100 million on fire to punch each other in the face,” he told reporters after his time on the stage.
Jones, Duncan’s successor as lieutenant governor, helps run a profitable family gas company. Jackson, a health care entrepreneur, entered the race with no background in government.
Jackson painted his outsider status and wealth as an asset.
Politicians sometimes do the wrong thing to please their donors, he said. “The only reason I’m running is to represent people that don’t have a voice. I could care less about what donors say. I can actually afford to do the right thing.”
Jones said the day’s discussions about policies on affordability, energy and taxes were ultimately less determinative than a gut check by voters.
“Everybody’s talking about the same thing,” he said. “And so at the end of the day, the voters have to decide who it is that they think can best execute on these promises.”
Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, delivered a similar line but with a twist that seemed aimed at Jackson and Jones. He said a rich guy and a rich guy’s dad were trying to buy the election, but “candidate quality matters.”
Carr said he supported a “humane” approach to immigrants brought here as children and that he would keep a state tax credit for affordable housing. He took a harder line against data centers than other Republicans, saying no community should have one “crammed down their throat.”
Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, appealed to older voters, saying he would support eliminating income taxes on retirement benefits while capping property tax increases that outpace the rise in Social Security checks. He told reporters that one solution to the health care crisis could be “charity clinics” where doctors have a “sliding fee structure” based on what patients can afford.
State Rep. Derrick Jackson, pointed to his leadership roles in the military and at General Electric and said he supported Medicaid expansion, a standard refrain among the four Democrats.
Jason Esteves, a former Atlanta school board chair and state senator, appealed to younger voters, saying he represented a “new generation of leadership.” Like nearly every candidate, he said a solution to Georgia’s workforce challenges would be to expand alternative pathways to a job. He said he would support tax credits for apprenticeship programs.
Most from both parties agreed that Georgia needs to steer more youths toward trade schools.
Michael Thurmond, who had perhaps the most expansive resume of the day, led the DeKalb County School District out of an accreditation crisis when he was an unconventional hire as superintendent over a decade ago. He went on to become the elected CEO of DeKalb.
Before all that he was the elected labor commissioner during the Great Recession, leading him to boast that he had connected more Georgians with a job than any candidate.
“White collar, blue collar, no collar. It’s not the color of the collar,” he said, “but it’s the green in the dollar that makes all the difference.”
ATLANTA — A little amendment to the last bill to pass the Georgia General Assembly this year could cause quite a stir if Gov. Brian Kemp signs it into law.
Or the Senate’s tweak to House Bill 1409 could do nothing, except give lawmakers pause about pursuing sex with a staffer.
The measure, which passed the Senate unanimously during the lunch hour on April 2, technically the last day of the legislative session, went on to pass the House 12 hours later, at 12:53 am, with broad bipartisan support.
The underlying bill updates a Georgia law that requires adults who interact with children to report suspected child abuse.
The amendment connects Georgia to recent events in Washington, D.C., where California Democrat Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Tony Gonzales each resigned from the U.S. House on Tuesday.
Swalwell stepped down and suspended his campaign for California governor after he was accused of sexually assaulting a former staffer. Gonzales admitted in a radio interview to having an affair with an aide who later took her own life by lighting herself on fire.
Georgia state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, said he was moved to introduce what lawmakers referred to as “the Epstein amendment” after he read about her death.
“I’m going to encourage our congressional delegation to look at what we did here and go up and take the same stand,” Robertson said this week after Swalwell and Gonzales resigned. “They represent us, so I think they have an obligation, the same as state senators and state representatives, to be transparent with the people who put them in office”
Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, discusses House Bill 1409 on the Senate Floor during what was technically the final day of the 2026 Legislative Session, Sine Die, on Thursday, April 2, at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta. This legislation sought to update the mandate for reporting child abuse. Another senator added what came to be called “the Epstein amendment,” a transparency mandate Robertson had added to other bills. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
Calling it the Epstein amendment is a misnomer since he was a financier rather than a lawmaker, but the connotation of sexual abuse is what led to the nickname for Robertson’s transparency mandate.
HB 1409, should the governor sign it, will require that the leaders of the House and Senate treat any settled claim of “sexual harassment, discriminatory harassment, discrimination, or retaliation” as an open record, subject only to the scrubbing of the complainant’s identity. Refusal to release such records after a request would be treated as a misdemeanor punishable with a fine of up to $1,000, or $2,500 for each additional violation within a year.
Robertson, who got another bill approved that would make it illegal for clergy to have sexual contact with people taking their counsel, said he felt lawmakers should hold themselves to the same standard.
He had been trying to get his transparency amendment approved since March 6, the deadline to “cross” bills from the Senate to the House, when he stuck it onto another bill about public access to mugshots and police videos. That bill did not pass. Nor did another he tried to attach it to. But other senators started copying him.
When Senate Minority Whip Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, added it to another bill, he said he looked back at her and smiled.
It is not a partisan proposal, Robertson said.
Jackson agreed to a point. She had attached Robertson’s language to a bill she opposed and hoped to kill, yet she said this week that sexual harassment is “rampant” in Congress and in legislatures across the country. Before she was elected, she toured the state Capitol with a YWCA group, and she said the lobbyist leading them warned about wearing clothing that might attract unwanted attention.
“Robertson is on the right side of history on this,” she said. But she also said that she thinks he just forced his colleagues — by that she meant Republicans — to support the measure. “You can’t vote against it, right?”
She said she thinks the disclosure mandate could use safeguards to protect against publicizing false claims of harassment, but she said she would still like Kemp to sign it into law. The Legislature can tend to those details in the future, she said, but in the meantime the transparency requirement would protect aides and other women who work under the Gold Dome.
“I think we’re all safer with having it brought to the light,” she said.
The version of the amendment that ultimately passed was tacked onto HB 1409 by Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, who is running for lieutenant governor.
He acknowledged that the language in his amendment had originated with Robertson, and he said he was moved to act by the failure of Congress to impose transparency on itself.
“The U.S. Congress voted to not do that,” he said on the Senate floor. “I think our body is better.”
ATLANTA — Georgia Chancellor Sonny Perdue announced Wednesday that he will retire from his job overseeing the state’s 25 public colleges and universities, ending a career that spanned more than four decades, from service on a local zoning board to the cabinet of President Donald Trump, with two terms as governor in between.
“As I prepare to retire, I’m grateful for our presidents, faculty and staff, our students
and the many communities that make up this remarkable system,” Perdue said in a statement. He did not give a definitive date, saying he would leave the post after a national search finds a successor.
Just over four years ago, on April 1, 2022, Perdue assumed leadership of a higher education system that now has a $12.1 billion budget, with 54,000 employees and 382,000 students.
Enrollment has grown during his tenure.
“Under his leadership, the system has seen record enrollment, modernized campuses and advanced medical education, including the launch of UGA’s new School of Medicine,” Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement, adding that Perdue’s time leading the University System of Georgia “has solidified a legacy of impact that will continue for generations to come.”
A native of Perry, Perdue attended undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Georgia, earning a veterinarian medical degree. He flew in the U.S. Air Force and owned an agricultural business.
He started his political career in the 1980s, on the Houston County Planning and Zoning Board, before making his way to the state Senate in 1991. He chaired the Senate Higher Education Committee and rose to the top rung for a senator as President Pro Tem.
In 2003, he made history by becoming the first Republican to occupy the Georgia governor’s office since Reconstruction, serving the maximum two terms. Trump, in his first term as president, then tapped Perdue as the 31st U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
After his pivot to chancellor, Perdue focused on affordability, eliminating a fee that saved students hundreds of dollars a year. He also restrained tuition growth, with students on average paying less now than in 2017 when adjusted for inflation, according to the system.
On Tuesday, the system Board of Regents raised tuition by 1% for in-state students and by 3% for out-of-state students.
Despite Perdue’s attention to affordability, critics noted that Georgia higher education remained out of reach for many from low-income households.
Lawmakers finally addressed that this year, budgeting $325 million as seed money toward a need-based program to be called the DREAMS Scholarship Endowment Fund. They placed the program under the control of the Georgia Student Finance Authority, but the idea started as a small fund in the University System of Georgia Foundation, under the leadership of Perdue.
The national search for Perdue’s successor will be conducted by a committee of the Board of Regents, with help from a consultant and from former Chancellor Stephen R. Portch and former Georgia State University President Mark Becker.
After they find a successor, Perdue, who has served as a foster parent with his wife, Mary, will have more time to spend with their four children, 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
ATLANTA — Tuition will rise 1% for Georgia students attending one of the state’s public colleges or universities, the state Board of Regents decided Tuesday.
The regents also increased tuition 3% for out-of-state students attending one of the University System of Georgia campuses.
“With enrollment at record levels, we’re focused on limiting new financial hurdles and delivering real value on every campus,” Chancellor Sonny Perdue said in a statement. “Today’s decision reinforces that commitment.”
Tuition covers only a portion of instructional costs, with the state paying for 57%, according to the university system. It said students pay, on average, less in tuition now than in 2017 when adjusted for inflation.
The system also said the Georgia General Assembly’s new budget for fiscal year 2027 includes a $34.2 million “reduction” in enrollment-driven state funding. The budget, which awaits the signature of Gov. Brian Kemp, increased the state funding for teaching to $3.5 billion, up nearly $229.5 million from the budget approved last year.
The Senate initially sought to roll that back by $123.5 million, but settled on a $34.2 million reduction in negotiations with the state House.
The Senate’s reduction was aimed at online courses, which leaders in that chamber said should cost the state less than in-person classes.
Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said on the Senate floor on April 2 that the Senate’s move had been framed publicly as a cutback.
“Only in government can more money next year than this year be called a cut,” he said.
ATLANTA — A Georgia Democrat aiming to win the primary race for governor fired a broadside against a competitor Monday because of his previous support for a ban on abortion, one of the most contentious topics of the era and a galvanizing issue for many female voters.
Jason Esteves, who resigned from his state Senate seat in Atlanta last year to run for governor, said in an online event with reporters that if elected governor he would work to repeal Georgia’s 2019 law banning abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically six weeks into a pregnancy.
The law penalizes doctors who disobey, leading to cases in which pregnant women were refused treatment.
“Republicans have made it less safe for people to have babies,” Esteves said.
He did not say the name of one of his opponents in the primary, Geoff Duncan, who was a Republican and the Georgia lieutenant governor when that law passed.
Esteves, instead, let his former colleague in the Senate, Minority Whip Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, target “Republicans like Duncan,” who “passed Georgia’s horrific abortion ban, which has led to the deaths of black women.”
The sharpest attack came from Shanette Williams, whose daughter Amber Nicole Thurman, died after doctors, hesitant about the new law, delayed removing remnants of her fetus after she self-aborted with pills.
“The only thing I see when we talk about Geoff Duncan is him standing behind the governor of the state of Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp, as he signs the bill into law. I see Geoff Duncan smiling and clapping as if this was the right thing to do,” Williams said. “How is it that you can run for governor after you were a part of murdering my child?”
Duncan said in a statement that he had reversed his views on abortion, saying part of his path of switching to the Democratic party “was understanding the devastating situations that women experience and doing the work to learn as much as I can to make it right. I was wrong to believe a room full of legislators knew more than millions of women.”
He said that as governor he would try to overturn the abortion ban and issue an executive order clarifying that “doctors can practice medicine without fear of persecution.”
Although Duncan’s primary opponents might want to disown him as a Democrat, some in the party have embraced him.
Rep. Michelle Au, D-Johns Creek, has publicly backed Duncan’s campaign, saying Republicans privately admit to her that the abortion ban was a mistake but refuse to say it publicly.
To reverse the ban, a Democrat must win the governor’s mansion, she said in a social media post Friday.
“Among my top priorities is repealing Georgia’s six week abortion ban and finally expanding Medicaid in this state,” wrote Au, a medical doctor. “We can’t do any of that if we don’t win. That’s why I’m supporting Geoff.”
Esteves had raised more campaign funding than any of the other Democrats in the race as of the last reporting period in February. He was just ahead of former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. He brought in double what Duncan did and three times as much as Michael Thurmond, a former DeKalb County CEO and school superintendent who won statewide races for labor commissioner three times starting in the late 1990s.
Yet Esteves has been trailing them in independent polls. He was so far back in a recent one, at 3.7%, that 11 Alive excluded him from a live debate scheduled for Wednesday among those other three.
Bottoms had a more than 20 percentage point lead over Duncan in the independent Emerson College Poll, and Duncan was a bit ahead of Thurmond.
The Esteves campaign pushed back, pointing to a poll last month, a few weeks after the independent one used by 11 Alive, that showed Esteves moving to second place with 14% but still behind Bottoms at 32%. It was paid for by a Democrat for Secretary of State. An Esteves campaign spokeswoman said she did not know why that candidate, Penny Brown Reynolds, paid for a gubernatorial poll. Before those two polls, a University of Georgia poll last fall had Esteves in fourth place with 3%.
Still, Esteves chose to target Duncan rather than Bottoms.
It was not the first time. During a televised gubernatorial forum at a Savannah church in January, Esteves criticized Duncan for his past support for the abortion ban.
Tharon Johnson, a Democratic strategist, said Esteves probably sees this line of attack as a way to boost his own name recognition at Duncan’s expense, in recognition of how toxic the abortion ban is among female Democratic voters.
“He’s also making this an important issue that will be discussed for the remainder of this Democratic nomination,” Johnson said of the May 19 primary election. “Other people have been saying it. Jason has just been the one that has been quadrupling down on it.”
