The weeks leading up to Friday’s qualifying deadline for candidates to run in Chatham County elections this year were, as usual, teeming with rumor.
Would anyone stand in the way of the much-anticipated fall contest between Chatham County’s politically besieged district attorney, Shalena Cook Jones and her former employee, Republican Anthony Burton?
COASTAL GEORGIA CANDIDATES
Would U.S. Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter of St. Simons face a primary challenge? Would former Savannah mayoral candidate Kesha Gibson Carter seek to unseat the chairman of the Chatham County Commission, Chester Ellis? Would Rep. Carl Gilliard (D-Savannah) leave Atlanta and return home to run for office in Garden City?
With the deadline for qualifying now past and the list of candidates in May’s primary election and November’s general elections now official, the answers to these and other questions are in.
Sure thing (not)
If there seemed any foregone conclusion entering candidate qualification week in Chatham County, it was that Burton would be running against his former boss, Cook Jones, for her job, in what promised to be one of the marquee races in this election cycle.
Riding the wave Republican-led anger against Georgia prosecutors they deemed soft on crime,
Burton had announced his candidacy more than 14 months ago. “People are literally getting away with murder in this county,” he declared.
He set up all the fixtures of contemporary electioneering — a Facebook page (Elect Anthony Burton- Chatham County District Attorney) and a website (ElectAnthonyBurton.com) — and became a fixture at Republican Party events across Chatham County, saluted by audiences for taking on Cook Jones, whom many of listeners reviled as a quintessential example of a soft-on-crime prosecutor.
So much for sure things.
Instead of entering the race for Chatham County district attorney, Burton last week filed papers to run for probate judge against the incumbent, Thomas C. Bordeaux Jr. His Facebook page was changed accordingly (Elect Anthony Burton- Chatham County Probate Court Judge).
Meanwhile, Cook Jones, who has been mired in legal controversy and become a favorite target of state Republicans over her views on criminal justice reform and her alleged mismanagement of her office, will face a Democratic Party primary challenge from another former employee, Jennifer Parker.
The winner will face Andre Pretorius, who worked for Cook Jones in the district attorney’s office for a year before quitting.
Stressing unity
In another rumor that proved only that, Gibson Carter did not mount a political comeback and throw her hat in the ring against Ellis, another Democrat.
With no primary opponent, the commission’s chairman will focus on November and his race against first-time candidate and Republican Joel Boblasky, a broker at Savannah’s PIER Commercial Real Estate.
Seeking to get a jump on the contest, Ellis kicked off his campaign last week in a carnival atmosphere, opening a campaign headquarters on Abercorn Street while stressing unity among the eight municipalities that make up Chatham County.
How well the unity theme plays remains to be seen.
The economic boom sweeping the region is pitting municipality against municipality and county against county in a race for resources to manage that growth. It also regularly sets the interests of the private sector against those of the public-at-large.
So, sure to be campaign issues will be Ellis’ handling of the referendum for a Transportation Special Local Option Sales Tax or TSPLOST in 2022 and the degree to which he fueled fights over allocations of local sales taxes among Chatham’s eight municipalities last year.
Scarce competition
The qualifications and experience of those who sit on regional bodies such as the nine-member Chatham County Commission are crucial to southeast Georgia’s future. For needed scrutiny, political competition is crucial. But in elections for commission seats this year, that competition is scarce, candidate qualification shows.
With no one from their own party or an opposing one having signed up to challenge them by Friday’s deadline, Democratic incumbents Malinda Scott Hodge (District 2), Bobby Lockett (District 3), and Tanya Milton (District 5), as well as Republican incumbent Pat Farrell (District 4), are each assured of four-year terms.
Absent the leading vote-getter failing to clear the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff, two other seats could be decided in the May 21 primary.
Republicans Austin Hill and Anthony Wayne Noha will square off to succeed Helen Stone, who is vacating her District 1 seat, which she has held since 2004.
And three Democrats — Marsha Buford, Deidrick Cody, and Laureen Monica Boles — will vie to replace Kenneth Adams who, like Stone, decided not to seek reelection to his District 8 seat. The winners of both primaries will appear on the November ballot unopposed.
That means that the only seats to be contested in November are those for District 6, where Democratic incumbent Aaron “Adot” Whitely will face Republican challenger, Leonard Massey, and in District 7, where Republican incumbent Dean Kicklighter will oppose Democratic challenger Orlando Scott.
Nonpartisan but not apolitical
Elections for the Savannah-Chatham County School Board are staggered, with four of the eight district seats up for grabs every two years.
Incumbents Denise Grabowski (District 1), Dionne Hoskins-Brown (District 2) and Cornelia Howell (District 3) qualified for the May ballot.
Grabowski will be opposed by Barbara Hubbard and Hall by Tanet Taharka Jones. But most attention will focus on District 7, Chatham County’s westernmost district, where the incumbent, Michael W. Johnson, will face off against Stephanie Campbell and James “Jay” Jones, both of Pooler.
By law, school board races are nonpartisan. That does not mean, though, that they are apolitical, especially in an era in which school board elections have become a battlefront in the nation’s culture wars.
Which is why the District 7 race promises to be noteworthy. Johnson is a well-known Republican in Chatham County, while Jones, a former chair of the Chatham County Democrats, ran in 2022 for the state Senate seat held by Ben Watson, losing in a rout by nearly 33% of the vote.
Power of incumbency
The power of incumbency is also the theme running through the races for the state Senate and House of Representatives.
In the House, Republicans Ron Stephens (District 164) and Jesse Petrea (District 166) and Democrats Anne Allen Westbrook (District 163), Carl Gilliard (District 162) and Edna Jackson (District 165) will face no primary challenges. And with the exception of Gilliard and Petrea, all will run opposed in November.
Democrat Gay Fortson, co-owner of the Friendship Coffee Company, will take on Petrea, while Gilliard, the four-term state senator from Garden City, will face the winner of May’s Republican primary between Tami Williams and Keith Padgett.
In 2022, Padgett lost the District 7 school board race to David Bringman by nearly 25% of the 5,608 votes cast.
In local Senate races, incumbent Derek Mallow (D-Savannah) will run unopposed in the Democratic primary and face no Republican challenger in November.
That absence of political competition is mirrored elsewhere in Coastal Georgia, where Mike Hodges (R-Brunswick) and Billy Hickman (R-Statesboro) will face no primary opposition in May and are guaranteed reelection in November, Hodges to a second, two-year term and Hickman to a third.
The only exception is in District 1, where incumbent Ben Watson (R-Savannah) will face off against Beth Majeroni, a grassroots activist who is running to Watson’s right. With no Democrat having entered the race, the winner is guaranteed the seat.
Whatever the outcome in the legislative elections, the composition of Coastal Georgia’s delegation in Atlanta appears unlikely to change. Seventeen out of Coastal Georgia’s 22 seats in the state House are held by Republicans, four by women. Three out of the region’s four seats in the Senate are held by Republicans. None are women.
So much for the talk.
As Coastal Georgia’s GOP parties have swung farther to the right and even more squarely behind former President Donald Trump in the past 18 months, it hasn’t been unusual to hear talk of a possible primary challenge to Buddy Carter, Coastal Georgia’s five-term congressman now living in St. Simons.
While Carter has again endorsed Trump for president this year, among Coastal Georgia Republican activists he is considered a prime example of the Washington establishment they detest.
So much for the talk: Carter will face no Republican primary challenger in May, setting up a contest with Richmond Hill’s Patti Hewitt, a Democrat.
To those Republicans deciding whether to enter a primary against Carter, money was certainly a factor. Like most incumbents, Carter amassed a large war chest entering this election cycle to deter opposition.
His three fundraising arms — Buddy Carter for Congress, Team Buddy, Buddy PAC — had receipts totaling more than $1.4 million last year, according to his filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Thanks for this rundown – very helpful to see options all in one place, enabling us to do our own research prior to voting! AND here’s something I hope to see get more publicity in the next week or two.
As a voter well over 65, a few years ago I had requested mail-in ballots for all elections. But I recently learned (or was reminded of something I’d forgotten?) that our voting laws had changed. Now we older voters must file a written request to receive mail-in ballots for the remainder of the year. And then file that request again each year. When I inquired how this word was getting out, I was told “so far it’s just word of mouth.” I suggest that The Current help spread info about this new requirement to older voters who prefer to vote via drop box or mail. (And I apologize if you have done so, and I missed it.) I’m grateful that I was able to discover this in time to request my ballot for the General Primary. Thanks.