Harold Jones II, the state Senate’s new minority leader, knows that his job is to put the best face on adversity.
Addressing reporters in Savannah Friday following his election to the post and just three days after party’s presidential candidate was soundly defeated, the 55-year-old lawmaker from Augusta sought to offer a ray of light to other Democrats.
Jones noted that Kamala Harris did well with only 100 days to campaign and that her loss to Donald Trump by 117,007 votes — or 2.2% of the vote — in Georgia in Tuesday’s election was a smaller margin than in other swing states.
He insisted, too, that Georgia hadn’t changed colors. “This is still certainly a very mixed state, very purple state,” Jones said. “For a black woman to be able to come to Georgia and only lose by 117,000 votes tells me quite a bit. This is not a situation where Georgia now it’s gone backwards.”
In state Senate races, although Republicans still hold a 10-seat majority in the chamber, Democrats successfully defended all 23 of theirs. “Nothing has really changed” in the legislature’s upper chamber, he said.
Still, Jones couldn’t avoid questions about the inevitable intra-party bloodletting that has followed the resounding defeat of his party’s presidential candidate on Tuesday, including calls for the head of the Georgia Democratic Party, U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams (Atlanta), to be replaced.
“It’s a team loss, quite frankly. I would ask people to ask themselves, ‘Did I do everything I could to make sure we got a victory? The answer is, ‘Probably not.’ I didn’t.”
‘We can really only react’
Jones was selected as minority leader at a three-day meeting of the Senate Democratic caucus. He succeeds Gloria Butler of Stone Mountain, the first women to serve as the head of either caucus. She’s retiring from the Senate at the end of this year after serving 26 years in the legislature.
Jones takes charge for the start of the next legislative session, which convenes Jan. 13.
As the new Democratic leader in the state Senate, he’ll face the minority’s party’s usual challenge.
Legislative goals are, by necessity, modest. The minority’s lawmakers can establish their legislative priorities, but they can’t dictate the legislative agenda and can’t unilaterally push through legislation. “We don’t really get to dictate the agenda, at all,” he acknowledged in an interview with The Current. “We really can only react to it.”
So, in the upcoming legislative session, success for Senate Democrats will be measured by their success in finding areas of common concern with Republicans and where possible, co-sponsoring legislation — a tall order, in view of the increasingly rightward tilt of Senate Republicans. It’s also measured by getting up-and-down votes on issues that reflect the party’s core principles.
“We’re basically in the same position we were last year,” Jones said. “We pushed for things last year, but whether we’re successful or not is not always the key.”
Tort reform, Medicaid expansion
Senate Republicans are scheduled to set their — and the chamber’s — legislative priorities at a meeting next week on Sea Island. Jones expects Republicans to take their cue from Gov. Brian Kemp and put tort reform at the top of the list.
For Senate Democrats, there will be little, if any, middle ground on this issue, Jones said.
Kemp’s arguments for the need for tort reform are based on “a lot of fiction,” he said, especially the notion that large settlements are going to many people who don’t deserve them.
As for Medicaid expansion, a top Democratic priority, Jones is more optimistic.
He touted as a bipartisan success getting a committee hearing on Medicaid expansion earlier this year, during the waning days of the last legislative session. The committee refused by one vote to send it to the floor, with Sen. Ben Watson (R-Savannah) joining the majority.
The new Senate minority leader welcomed comments this week by Republican Lt. Gov. Burt Jones indicating that he was willing to discuss Medicaid expansion in the upcoming session.
“I think that’s good,” the senator said, calling such expansion “one of the major issues that’s going to be facing our state.”
The willingness of the lieutenant governor, who also serves as Senate leader, to discuss Medicaid expansion isn’t new: At the start of the last legislative session, he didn’t dismiss an Arkansas-style model for expansion that uses federal money to purchase private plans for those who are eligible.
Political considerations weigh heavily in the lieutenant governor’s posture on expansion. He has made no secret of his interest in succeeding Kemp, who is barred from seeking another four-year term in the next gubernatorial election in 2026. He also knows that expansion will be at the top of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate’s plank.
Still, the willingness of the Senate leader puts him at odds with Kemp, who is determined to see his own version of Medicaid succeed, though to date only a tiny fraction of eligible state residents have signed up for the program. The program, Georgia Pathways, is the only Medicaid program in the U.S. with a work requirement.
It also potentially puts him at odds with Trump, whom he has embraced, as well as the Trump-dominated Georgia GOP.
The president-elect has said he wants to replace the Affordable Care Act, known informally as Obamacare, the law he tried unsuccessfully to kill during his first term. In his debate with Harris, Trump said he had “concepts” of the plan to replace the ACA, informally known as Obamacare, but never revealed them.
‘We understand it takes time’
The state Senate’s new Democratic leader isn’t daunted by the challenge.
“We’re Democrats. We’re the minority party,” he said. “We understand it takes time. It will be tough. But sometimes we’re willing to wait it out to make sure we do what’s right for people of Georgia.”
Other Senate Democrats elected to posts in a secret ballot on Friday were Kim Jackson (Stone Mountain), whip; Elena Parent (Atlanta), caucus chair; Sonya Halpern (Atlanta), vice chair; Jason Esteves (Atlanta), vice chair for finance; and Nan Orrock (Atlanta), secretary.
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