Georgia voters handed the Democrats nearly the whole state government yesterday. Keisha Lance Bottoms beat Republican Rick Jackson for governor, making her the first Democrat to win the office since 1998. Democrats also took lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state school superintendent, and the commissioners of agriculture, insurance, and labor. They swept every statewide state office on the ballot, and they appear to have won the state House for the first time in 22 years.
I escaped Democrat-occupied Illinois in 2020 and moved to Georgia. I know what bad governance looks like. That move gave me six good years of sound state government. I want to thank the people of Georgia for those six years. It was nice while it lasted.
When we moved to Georgia, we felt the economic benefit immediately. Income tax rates were about the same, but everything else cost us less: our house, property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline, groceries, and the other everyday things a person needs to live. For the first time in my life, we received property tax reductions and income tax rebates. Georgia has sent four rounds of one-time income tax rebates since 2022, and we got $500 of our own money back each time. The 2023 Homeowner Tax Relief Grant also cut $18,000 off the assessed value of qualifying homes.
The state ran budget surpluses, and by 2024 the surplus had grown to more than $16 billion. Georgia didn’t use accounting tricks to get there either. The state’s fiscal house was in order, and things were good. Republicans held full control of Georgia government for more than two decades and built a solid economic model, and because of that, the state has been on a tremendous path of economic growth.
How I Believe the Republicans Lost
Iran and Trump were “on the ballot.” His attack on Iran has weighed down the entire nation. The last thing the country needed was a new war in the Middle East and higher energy prices, which add to the already stagnation inducing inflationary pressures.
The problem lies with the percentage of hardcore Trump Republicans in Georgia. These people think Trump can do no wrong, and they put up candidates who didn’t have a chance against the “feel good” of voting for the first black woman governor. Bottoms’ poor history as mayor of Atlanta didn’t matter, and neither did the way she abandoned the office after announcing in May 2021 that she would not seek a second term. Voters ignored all of it when she ran against a billionaire white man who said he’d be Trump’s favorite governor. Jackson lost by more than 8 points as of this writing.
Instead of asking which candidate would continue the state’s prosperity, voters cast ballots out of their hatred of Trump and for the promise of a massive expansion of state entitlement programs. Bottoms said as much in her victory speech, dedicating the win to the “caregiver” who “needs Georgia to finally expand Medicaid.” I believe most voters have no real idea about what they’re voting for. What they think is best for “the collective,” in the end, turns out to be the worst thing for it.
At Least This Should Prove that Money Alone Doesn’t Buy Elections
We should bury the notion that elections can simply be bought. Jackson raised about $250 million for his campaign, most of it from his own pocket, while Bottoms raised about $40 million. He had roughly six times her money and still lost. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign cost more than $768 million, nearly double the roughly $398 million Trump spent, and by mid-October 2024 the Harris campaign had spent more than $880 million against roughly $354 million for Trump. The candidate decides the election. Money helps, but it isn’t the difference maker people think it is. Anyone who still believes the rich can buy an election should ask Rick Jackson how he feels now.
My Frame of Reference
For most of my life, the Democrats controlled the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois. The Republican party in Illinois never operated as a separate entity in practice. Illinois Republicans played ball with the Democrats until the Democrats took full control, and then the Democrats gerrymandered them into obscurity. The state has never recovered, and voters keep electing the same people who make it worse every year. It’s so bad in Illinois that as of the end of fiscal year 2025, the state’s five pension systems had $143.5 billion in unfunded liabilities. Chicago and Cook County carry huge unfunded pension liabilities of their own. It’s not just the pensions. The whole of government is sclerotic and growth inhibiting.
I’ve voted for both Republicans and Democrats over my life, but I’m libertarian by nature. I don’t want anyone to control me, and I feel both parties want to do that, just from different sides. I tend to vote Republican because Republicans tend to spend fewer taxpayer dollars than Democrats. That may not have held true at the national level in recent decades, but it has held true more often than not at the state and local level.
I used to believe Americans were libertarian at heart. Now, given that I’m almost 60 years old, I can see that only a small percentage think this way. The rest want someone to take care of them. They want a nanny government to take all their problems away. They don’t want to be left alone to live or die by their own hands. They would rather live with mid-level suffering than risk forging their own happy path.
What Is the Purpose of Government?
I’m a firm believer that government should do as little as possible. Government should exist to settle disputes between parties and enforce the law. It should not exist to give you housing, medical care, or food. Government should never take tax dollars from one person just to hand them to another. Socialist programs fail everywhere they’re tried, and they have never succeeded because government never has to be efficient. Government is the ultimate monopoly, with no competitor to beat and no customer to lose. I’m also of a mind that if any election makes you feel bad when it’s over, regardless of which side of the winner you’re on, then it’s proof positive that government is too powerful and too intrusive in your life.
Thank You, Georgia
So I’m thanking the people of Georgia for six good years of conservative state governance and the pleasure it was to live with it. I hope Bottoms won’t be as bad as I think she’ll be, and I hope the other Democrats who won statewide races won’t be as bad as I think they’ll be either. I had hoped Republicans would keep the General Assembly to slow down anything she wants to do. Republicans held the state Senate with a narrower majority, but Democrats appear to have won the House, and a Democrat will preside over the Senate as lieutenant governor.
Georgia spent two decades getting its finances in order, and a single election put all of it in jeopardy. It doesn’t take long for bad policies to ruin a state, but it takes nearly forever to fix one once the damage is done. Just look at California, New York, and my home state of Illinois.
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