Incumbent Georgia District 1 Sen. Ben Watson is returning to the capitol.
The four-term senator from Isle of Hope handily defeated activist and first-time political candidate Beth Majeroni in a contest over whose brand of conservative politics had more appeal among Republican primary voters in District 1.
With 66.67% of the ballots counted, Watson had 62.07% of the vote to Majeroni’s 37.93%. The tally is unofficial.
Watson, a family practice physician, now faces a familiar situation as he heads into the November election.
He’s all but a shoo-in to be sworn in for a fifth Senate term representing District 1, which encompasses Liberty and Bryan counties, as well as parts of Chatham, including Savannah’s far south side and Skidaway, Wilmington, and Tybee islands.
The Democratic Party didn’t field a candidate to contest the seat, so Watson’s name will appear alone on the ballot in November for the District 1 race.
In his career in the Georgia General Assembly, Watson has faced primary opposition only once, in 2010, when he won a Savannah-area seat in the state House of Representatives. He has run unopposed in general elections four times.
The Watson-Majeroni race was a battle-of-the-brands, a test of Majeroni’s far-right “grassroots” conservatism versus Watson’s more buttoned-down, establishment one.
She depicted the 64-year-old Watson as a smug insider, captive to lobbyists and special interests in Atlanta — a “non-conservative, conservative.”
Watson, in turn, portrayed Majeroni, a 69-year-old retired pharmacy executive and reading specialist, as a rabble-rouser who doesn’t “work well with others,” ill-suited for the compromises required of an effective lawmaker.
For her part, Majeroni preferred to describe herself an “America First” Republican, though she didn’t shun as undignified or coarse the label “activist.” She embraced it.
In the campaign’s final weeks, however, Majeroni’s reputation for “speaking truth to power” — politely but forcefully, she was always quick to say — appeared to boomerang on her.
The Skidaway Island conservative had vaulted to prominence among conservatives statewide and beyond as a freedom fighter for the 1st Amendment and “election integrity” last July, after two Chatham County police officers forcibly removed her from a hearing of the Chatham County Board of Elections.
Her expulsion came after she spoke during the meeting’s public comment period about some election-related, grand jury proceedings — a subject the board had barred from public discussion.
Watson turned the portrait of her removal from the hearing on its head.
His campaign blanketed the district with fliers featuring the photo of her being carried from the hearing room, with text saying the incident — far from being the actions of a “patriot” and “modern-day hero” fighting attempts to muzzle her — showed that she doesn’t “work well with others” or “back the blue.”
In the end, Majeroni apparently didn’t succeed in convincing voters that she wasn’t defying the police, if not breaking the law — a no-no for the GOP, which prides itself as being the law-and-order party.