ATHENS — Georgia’s two candidates for governor showcased their competing plans for healthcare, jobs and other top issues at a business-focused gathering Wednesday.
Gov. Brian Kemp also gave his full-throated support to fellow Republican Rick Jackson, saying Jackson was the most likely candidate to continue his business-friendly policies.
The Democrat in the race, former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, spoke of government solutions for problems such as the shortage of affordable housing and healthcare.
The two candidates did not confront each other directly, outlining their platforms instead from a ballroom stage and in a hallway with reporters.
But the event, hosted by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce at The Classic Center in Athens, offered a rare opportunity to see them at the same venue, talking about many of the same issues.
Bottoms touted developer agreements for affordable housing reached during her tenure as mayor. And she said she would push for Medicaid expansion to confront rural hospital closures and the growing number of Georgians without health insurance.
Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, talks to reporters at The Classic Center in Athens on Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
Kemp, meeting with reporters with Jackson by his side, said he had decided to back the wealthy healthcare staffing entrepreneur because Jackson had succeeded despite a tough childhood in foster homes, a story that Jackson has repeatedly shared while campaigning.
Kemp also said he believed Jackson would build on his business-friendly legacy as governor, which Jackson quickly confirmed.
Jackson said he would seek to cut taxes while continuing to recruit companies to locate in the state, adding that he would steer economic development and jobs to rural Georgia as Kemp has done.
He said he would help small businesses and farmers.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp tells reporters he is backing Rick Jackson, the Republican candidate for governor, as Jackson watches, at The Classic Center in Athens on Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2026. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
From the stage, before an audience of hundreds in suits, Jackson said he planned on “increasing a huge amount of investment dollars for venture capital, early-stage development and PE just for Georgia companies. Atlanta is too big not to have more capital.”
Bottoms also said she would cater to small business, but her approach included government money. She said she would establish a state agency for small business and change contracts for services.
“I’d like to break up some of these mega-contracts in our state … to give small businesses an opportunity to compete for those contracts,” she said.
Bottoms also said she wanted to end Georgia’s Pathways to Coverage program, Kemp’s approach to Medicaid, which she called wasteful.
A federal review last year found that most of the money went to administrative overhead rather than to medical assistance. The program was set to expire last September, but the administration of President Donald Trump granted a one-year extension.
Jackson told reporters that he believed in “intelligent” Medicaid expansion. By that, he meant a federal block grant with few strings attached, for a program designed to transition recipients into jobs and onto private insurance.
Pathways already has a work requirement.
Bottoms and Jackson also had divergent views on data centers.
Bottoms reiterated an earlier call to “pause” data center approvals, while Jackson said he would leave it up to communities whether to allow them to build, noting the potential local tax benefits.
ATLANTA — A water utility that serves 300,000 homes and businesses in metro Atlanta is still investigating whether a hacker caused a service outage last week.
That July 27 shutdown in northern Clayton County occurred the same day that water utilities in at least seven states started reporting incidents to the federal government involving the computers that automate their processes.
On Thursday, the FBI and Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint announcement that “malicious cyber actors” had been attacking utilities’ programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, sometimes degrading water operations.
The attacks reportedly caused flooding and loss of water pressure, which can allow untreated groundwater to seep into service pipes.
That is what happened for three hours after midnight in Clayton County, when the water authority had to issue a boil-water advisoryfor several communities after a pump station failed.
“We’re still investigating what exactly caused the outage,” Erin Thomas, the spokeswoman for the Clayton County Water Authority, said Tuesday. “Some of our equipment just lost power, so we can’t confirm that somebody hacked into it. “
Thomas said that kind of failure had never happened before.
“Most of the time when you have any type of outage of that sort, it’s typically due to a main break,” Thomas said, adding that the authority’s technology experts were trying to determine whether the PLCs were involved.
The joint announcement by the FBI and EPA last week did not identify the hackers, but a previous advisory from another federal security agency blamed Iran.
The July 22 bulletin from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency updated an original warning from April. The agency warned that “ongoing Iranian-affiliated cyber targeting of internet-connected operational technology,” including PLCs, had been disrupting “several U.S. critical infrastructure sectors.”
The agency, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, advised U.S. organizations to “urgently review” their systems for indications of intrusion.
The FBI recommended last week that operators lock down their PLCs with firewalls, strong passwords and restrictions on who can access them.
The potential connection between Iran, multi-state infrastructure hacks and Clayton County was first reported Monday by WSB-TV in Atlanta.
The news station reported that a Georgia Tech professor and his researchers had identified thousands of programmable logic controllers that had been configured in a way that made them vulnerable to online hackers. The professor, a cybersecurity expert, told the news station his lab had alerted 7,000 institutions.
A spokesman for the FBI in Atlanta told Capitol Beat by email Tuesday that the agency was aware of the security concerns about water service.
“The FBI and our interagency partners are fully engaged to protect critical infrastructure and we remain well-equipped to protect against cyber threats of all varieties,” he wrote.
ATLANTA — Social media posts by Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins and his associates have become a target of Sen. Jon Ossoff and his allies.
U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, who hopes to unseat Ossoff, the Democratic incumbent, has a history of edgy online posts.
The people around him have sometimes crossed a line in their own posts.
During the GOP primary, Collins fired a campaign staffer who had mocked the wife of an adviser to a PAC supporting one of Collins’ Republican opponents after she said she had been sexually assaulted.
In 2024, Collins himself acknowledged “potentially inappropriate behavior” in a video he had shared about anti-Israel protesters. A counter protester is on screen making ape-like gestures and noises at a Black woman, and Collins later said it was not his intent to “glorify” such behavior.
Now, Ossoff is turning the spotlight on Collins’ family.
David Alan Scheer II, Collins’ son-in-law, is a prolific online poster who has amassed a significant following on multiple platforms.
Last month, CNN reported that many of Scheer’s posts promoted white nationalism and antisemitism, including one last year about the financial influence of Jews on the U.S. government. Scheer wrote in his Telegram post that the included infographic had been prepared by his wife, Collins’ daughter.
“This man is a known bigot and antisemite,” Ossoff said in a virtual interview with reporters late last week. He called on Collins to apologize “for his extensive and well-documented ties to white nationalists and neo-Nazi ideology.”
Later that day, during a news conference about health care, Collins faced a flurry of questions about the issues raised by Ossoff and abruptly canceled the event.
On Monday, two Black ministers held another news conference to demand that Collins clarify where he stands on white supremacy.
Rev. Gerald Durley, a retired pastor who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., said he would never claim Collins supports white nationalist ideology.
“However, I do join with countless others for him to publicly denounce the political position of white nationalists,” Durley said outside Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta. “Georgia cannot send a man to Washington to represent all of the people of Georgia who will not disclaim the allegations that he is a white nationalist sympathizer.”
Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church, said that as a native Georgian he knows racism when he sees it.
He said Ossoff had his vote, yet he called on Collins to clarify “what you think about white supremacy or Christian nationalism or black folk or anybody non-white … . Tell us what you believe so that all of Georgia can make an intelligent choice come this November.”
Rev. Timothy McDonald III spoke to reporters outside Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta on Monday, Aug. 3, 2026 after Rev. Gerald Durley to his left. (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
Scheer’s online life brings the controversy to Collins’ doorstep. CNN noted that Collins’ daughter lives with her husband on property owned by Collins.
Scheer has promoted the group Patriot Front, according to CNN.
Last year, Scheer called Benjamin Netanyahu a “satanic warmongering Zionist piece of garbage” for bombing Iran and trying to draw America into the conflict. Scheer said in his June 17, 2025 video on Instagram that the Israeli leader was trying to “pull the Holocaust card and say he’s preventing a nuclear Holocaust because the Jewish people are victims of everything, apparently.”
The next day, Scheer posted an image of a couple embracing three young children as a statue of an eagle enfolds them. The picture is overlaid with the words, “I want to make babies Not die for Israel”
Scheer wrote in his accompanying post: “If you haven’t noticed, we all have a common enemy.”
The image matches a Nazi propaganda poster published between 1933 and 1940, according to the Library of Congress. The title, “Die NSDAP sichert die Volksgemeinschaft,” roughly translates to “the Nazi Party protects and secures the national community.” The word “Volksgemeinschaft” has racial overtones.
Collins set the record straight Monday, saying in a statement to Capitol Beat that no one speaks for him, including Scheer.
“He has had no role in my campaign whatsoever,” Collins said, “and I don’t believe or support those views and I have always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source.”
Collins said he is for safer cities, affordable gas and groceries and more opportunities for hard-working Georgians. He called Ossoff a “trust fund socialist” pushing a “far left extreme agenda.”
ATLANTA — When COVID-19 struck, schools closed, students “attended” from home, and too many got out of the habit of going to school when the doors reopened.
In 2022, nearly a quarter of Georgia’s students had absenteeism rates high enough to be considered “chronic” — nearly double the rate before the pandemic.
But new data show that the state is gradually recovering. More students are still missing school than before COVID-19, but the rate has been steadily falling, dropping to 17.7% during the 2025-26 school year.
That is nearly 2 percentage points lower than the prior year, which in turn was nearly 2 points lower than in 2023-24, the state data show. The rate remains more than 5 percentage points above the rates in the two years before the pandemic, but observers find Georgia’s trajectory to be promising, especially when many other states have found their absenteeism problems to be more stubborn.
The Georgia Department of Education released the new rates last week, well ahead of most other states, noted Nat Malkus, with the American Enterprise Institute.
“Perhaps even more impressively,” he wrote in an analysis published Thursday, “Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate is declining steadily, bucking the national trend.”
During the 2024-25 school year, Georgia’s chronic absenteeism rate was 19.5%, beating the estimated national average by more than 2 percentage points, according to the group FutureEd, whose numbers had Georgia among the third of the states with the lowest rates.
“We applaud the Georgia Department of Education’s early release of end-of-the-year attendance data, which shows an impressive fifth consecutive year of decreased chronic absence,” Hedy Chang, president and CEO of the group Attendance Works, said in a statement. “Georgia’s commitment to timely end-of-the-year data is a model for how states can make a difference.”
Some of that success came after lawmakers passed a law last year that required more coordinated and sustained efforts against absenteeism. Senate Bill 123 required that school districts with high rates create attendance review teams that engage parents.
State lawmakers tried to build on that this year with Senate Bill 513.
“If we do not have kids’ butts in seats, they are not going to learn,” Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, said before the measure passed with just one vote against it in the Senate.
But the measure faced overwhelming opposition in the House due to some provisions seen as draconian, including loss of driving privileges. Many students who skip a lot of school need their licenses so they can get to jobs — not to mention to school, critics said.
Studies have shown that treating the problem with punishment does not work well, said Matt Smith, the policy and research director for the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education.
Indeed, using punishment to address misbehavior in general can aggravate the absenteeism problem by turning school into an unwelcoming environment, he said. Out-of-school suspension, one such “legacy” strategy, directly increases absenteeism.
Instead, Georgia schools are more often trying to address the underlying problems, he said. That started with more behavioral and mental health counseling.
But poor physical health can also rob students of their ability to focus, which can in turn lead them to misbehave, he said, so more schools are looking at that too.
“It could be something as simple as getting them hearing aids or glasses, getting them dental care,” he said.
Smith said the data the state education department has been releasing allows more people, including businesses and organizations in each community, to help school districts identify commonalities among students who are missing a lot of school.
That enables the districts to focus their resources on those students, and it allows the community to help.
They have a reason to help. Research shows that absenteeism affects the whole classroom by bogging down teachers who must divide their students into different groups as they try to catch up the kids who have fallen behind, Smith said.
Georgia and other states still have a lot of work to do to get their absenteeism rates back to a manageable level, Malkus wrote in his analysis. But he added that Georgia is showing how progress is possible when it is seen as an urgent priority.
Many states take far longer than Georgia did to release their data from the prior school year, he wrote. “Indeed, there are some states — Minnesota and Texas among them — that still have not released data for the 2024–25 school year.”
ATLANTA — A third former Georgia lawmaker has pleaded guilty to unemployment assistance fraud in federal court in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sharon Henderson, 67, of Covington, pleaded guilty Thursday to making false statements to fraudulently obtain thousands of dollars from the federal government through a program established by Congress to help workers through the crisis, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“While running for and holding political office, Representative Henderson was fleecing taxpayers, lying to steal money from federal programs intended to help people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said in a statement.
Two other former state representatives, also Democrats, were previously convicted of similar unemployment assistance fraud.
Karen L. Bennett pleaded guilty Jan. 21 to making false statements to obtain $13,940 in unemployment benefits, and Dexter L. Sharper pleaded guilty March 11 to making false statements and collecting $13,825, according to Hertzberg’s office in the Northern District of Georgia.
Henderson pleaded guilty to collecting $17,811 in unemployment benefits by filing fraudulent weekly certifications that she could not report to her job with the Henry County Schools, Hertzberg’s office said. Henderson claimed she had worked for the school system throughout 2019 and into early 2020, until quarantines made that impossible.
Yet she had only worked as a substitute teacher for five days in 2018 and had signed an acknowledgment that substitutes were ineligible to draw unemployment wages, prosecutors said. She applied for unemployment benefits in June 2020 while running for the state House and filed eight fraudulent certifications in June 2021 after she was sworn in, they added.
Henderson is scheduled for sentencing before U.S. District Judge Michael L. Brown on Nov. 3.
