He attended the University of Georgia but never graduated. His voter registration lists his residence as a Chatham County home owned by his mother and a mailing address in Atlanta. Just as his prominent father did more than three decades ago, he is hoping to jump from a job as an insurance salesman to a seat in the U.S. Congress.
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Jim Kingston, the 35-year-old son of former longtime Coastal Georgia Congressman Jack Kingston, has been criticized by his Republican primary opponents as someone with a paper-thin résumé trading on his father’s success. But heading into the crowded May 19 primary election, the first-time candidate boasts the most valuable piece of currency in GOP politics: President Donald Trump’s endorsement.
A week before the election, the depth of support for Kingston across the 1st Congressional District is unclear. He is among six Republicans vying to replace Rep. Buddy Carter, who succeeded the elder Kingston in 2015 and is running for the U.S. Senate.
The Current GA spoke to two dozen Republicans who have known Jim Kingston for years and have strong opinions about their neighbor and colleague who grew up in the Savannah area but has lived much of his adult life elsewhere in Georgia. Few wanted their names used, even though many echoed the barbs of his primary rivals who have derided him as the “Atlanta candidate.”
Kingston’s campaign repeatedly declined to make the candidate available for an interview. At the request of The Current, it instead provided two people to discuss why they are voting for him. Both emphasized his work ethic.
“Tenacious,” said Bryan Griffis, who worked with Kingston at his first insurance job at Partner’s Risk Services in Johns Creek, a northeast suburb of Atlanta.
Many staunch Republicans beyond Chatham interviewed by The Current, friends as well as critics, wonder just whose interests Kingston would represent if elected: the district’s 13 heavily Republican and largely rural counties or moneyed interests in Savannah and Washington.
Is Jim Kingston more than the sum of his family name and the contacts amassed by his father, who has thrived as a Washington lobbyist since leaving Congress? More pointedly, they ask, is he his own man?
Like father, like son
If anyone could be said to be a chip off the old block, it is Jim Kingston.
Like his father, he attended the University of Georgia. And like his father, he was steeped in Republican politics from an early age.
The youngest of four children, Jim tagged along on his father’s campaign swings through Coastal Georgia while attending St. Andrew’s School, a Savannah-area private high school. While at UGA, he drove his father across the state in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 2014. He joined his siblings in a 30-second ad entitled “He’s really cheap.”
But the clever ode to his father’s fiscal conservatism was in vain. Jack Kingston lost the Republican primary to David Perdue by 29,000 votes. Both father and son, then in his early 20s, took the defeat hard.
“My son Jim, who had been involved in the campaign from the very beginning, he was sitting in the back of the room” with his head down, Jack Kingston later recalled in a 2016 podcast about defeated politicians. “It was just so hard for me to look at him.”
Kingston swapped his seat in Congress and his high-ranking spot on the powerful House Appropriations Committee and to join the prominent Washington law firm Squire Patton Boggs as a lobbyist.
While Jim Kingston’s candidacy invites comparisons with his father, the family’s staying power in Chatham may owe as much to his mother, Elizabeth (“Libby”) Morris Kingston, whose family ties run deep in Savannah.
Today, Jim Kingston’s ties to Coastal Georgia remain in the Isle of Hope neighborhood where he grew up. His voter registration, last updated May 16, 2025, lists a home his mother owns there as his “residence address.” It is close to properties owned by his grandmother, sister and aunt.
Last June, Libby and Jack Kingston, who by then were divorced, were listed together among the “honorary campaign chairs” for their son’s private campaign kick-off reception and fundraiser.
‘Dedicated his life’
On the campaign trail, however, it is his father’s name and network that Kingston’s campaign has leaned into, as well as the candidate’s Republican Party credentials.
Asked at a televised candidate debate last month what civic organization he belonged to, Jim Kingston cited only one: the Republican Party.
Besides working on his father’s races and writing four articles for the Atlanta-based James magazine in 2015 — three of them Q&As with Republican politicians in the state — he has served as a volunteer and fundraiser for other GOP candidates.
According to Chris D’Aniello, Kingston’s campaign manager, those candidates included Sam Olens, whose last campaign for public office was an attorney general’s race in 2010; Eddie DeLoach, who ran successfully for mayor of Savannah in 2015 and lost reelection in 2019; and Ginger Howard, who ran for the post of Republican National Committeewoman in 2016 and for reelection in 2020.
D’Aniello also said Kingston volunteered for Herschel Walker, who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022; Meghan Hanson, who last ran for public office in Brookhaven in 2018; and Buddy Carter, whose last campaign for the U.S. House was 2024.
It is unclear how Kingston won Trump’s endorsement, but it was effusive.
The president, on his Truth Social website, praised him as “a very successful Businessman, Civic Leader, and Conservative Activist” who has “dedicated his life to serving his Community.” The president also extolled the elder Kingston. “Jim’s father is the GREAT Former Congressman from Georgia.”
It is unclear what successful business the president was referring to. In 2017, Kingston formed a company, Tarboro Holdings, and planned to offer fundraising and other services to political candidates, D’Aniello said. The company, which lists the Atlanta apartment then owned by Kingston’s parents as its address, dissolved two years later, according to state records.
He has held successive insurance industry jobs since 2015, according to his campaign.
No college degree
Kingston’s civic engagement as a Republican campaign volunteer coincided with his undergraduate years at the University of Georgia in Athens, where he was enrolled from May 12, 2009 until July 31, 2015, according to the university’s registrar’s office.
His campaign literature describes Kingston as having “attended” the University of Georgia; the registrar’s office told The Current he never earned a degree.
Kingston’s campaign manager confirmed that he has no college degree.
Each of Kingston’s Republican opponents in the primary have earned a college degree — including Brian Montgomery, a graduate of West Point; Patrick Farrell, a graduate of Georgia Southern University; and Kandiss Taylor, the Appling County native who has four graduate degrees.
According to the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan agency administered by the Library of Congress, the overwhelming majority — 96% — of members of the current U.S. Congress are four-year college graduates.
In response to questions from The Current about Kingston’s academic history, D’Aniello said Kingston left UGA to work on his father’s 2014 U.S. campaign. Afterward, he received job offers, including one from Partners Risk Strategies, which he accepted.
In 2019, he jumped to Ironwood Insurance Service, and worked briefly at the Atlanta-based firm before it was bought in January 2020 by a division of Marsh McClennan, one of the world’s largest risk-management and insurance services firms.
When asked by The Current to describe Kingston’s job responsibilities, D’Aniello said he has a “kind of a traveling sales role” and manages a portfolio of about 30 clients.
On the campaign website, Kingston is described as a senior vice president, with no further information.
Marsh McClennan, which has 15,000 employees and 20 offices in Georgia alone, did not reply to repeated requests for clarification about how many of its workers hold the title of senior vice president and about their tasks.
‘A regular presence’
Kingston announced his plans to run for the 1st District Congressional seat last June, declaring in a press release that he had already raised $500,000 in one week.
But when, exactly, he relocated to Chatham County is unclear.
D’Aniello, the campaign manager, said Kingston returned “full-time” to his home town from Atlanta during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But three sources told The Current that Kingston only became a regular presence in Savannah around the same time as the campaign kickoff.
Kingston’s voter registration was updated May 16, 2025. That document lists his “residence address” as an Isle of Hope property owned by his mother and his mailing address as the Buckhead condominium that his parents purchased for $208,000 in 2013 and he bought from them nine years later for $360,000.
While Kingston’s wife owns property on Isle of Hope, the candidate owns no property in Chatham, according to the Chatham County Board of Assessors.
D’Aniello said Kingston currently “rents” in the area.
Hard to pin down
At last month’s televised candidate debate, Kingston sought to assure voters of his ties to Coastal Georgia, despite taunts from rival candidates Farrell and Taylor that he is “the Atlanta candidate.”
Kingston replied: “My car tag has always said ‘Chatham County.’ My phone number has always said ‘912’.”
D’Aniello said Kingston’s job has required him “to spend time in Atlanta, time in Savannah, and constant movement in between,” and that he has worked remotely from Savannah since the Covid pandemic.
He added: “Anyone suggesting that Jim Kingston’s connection to Savannah is a recent development or political convenience is not being sincere and can’t be taken seriously.”
But beyond regular visits to family and friends, Kingston’s ties to Coastal Georgia as an adult are hard to pin down.
Kingston has not joined the highly visible millennial leaders of the Republican Party in building a social media brand that might document his time in the district.
Kingston’s digital footprint is almost non-existent. He does not appear to have any personal social media accounts. He rarely appears in any social media photos posted by other people, either.
In late January, when Kingston married Meredith Baird in a private wedding ceremony at Isle of Hope Methodist Church, no photos of that event or the reception at the Savannah Country Club appeared on social media.
John Skeadas, a childhood friend, said the candidate has never had much of an online presence.
Kingston’s campaign, meanwhile, has a carefully curated series of photos showing Kingston fishing and hunting, as well as the candidate mingling with small groups of people at invitation-only campaign events.
A local Republican said the campaign appears to be limiting the candidate’s unscripted moments and has “gone Biden” to not jeopardize a primary victory. That refers to the way that Joe Biden’s campaign team in the 2020 presidential campaign limited his public appearances in a “just visible enough” campaign strategy.
Resentment
As the May 19 primary draws near, doubts persist about Kingston’s ability to represent all of Coastal Georgia in Congress, even among some who say they will vote for him.
Having less information about the candidate for voters to chew over has fed mistrust outside Chatham County.
Attendance by Kingston has been rare at candidate forums organized by older, pro-Trump county party leaders. Those absences have rankled grassroots Republicans, who view them as a sign that at best, Kingston does not take them seriously or at worst, disdains them, at a time when resentment towards big-city elites is running high.
During one such forum in Blackshear in mid-February, a handwritten place card bearing Kingston’s name hung in front of an empty chair to call attention to his absence.
Following the forum, as candidates lingered to answer questions and a few attendees stacked chairs, Larry Brantley, chairman of the Wayne County Republican Party, offered his explanation for Kingston’s no-show:
“His daddy gave him a lot of money, so he doesn’t think he has to come to these things.”
‘A unifier’
Kingston’s massive campaign war chest — by the end of April, it totaled $1.86 million — has paid for high quality social media reels and video spots. House Republican leaders Jim Jordan and Tom Emmer, onetime colleagues of his father, have endorsed him. So has U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Jordan himself traveled to Savannah last month to stump for him at a rally on Wilmington Island. The candidate spoke for less than five minutes.
Still, some Trump supporters in the area question the depth of Kingston’s loyalty to Trump. They remember that before father became an advisor to the Trump campaign in 2016, he supported Cruz for president in the primary, hosting rallies for him in Savannah twice during that campaign season.
The two people whose names were provided by the campaign to The Current said their support for Kingston has nothing to do with his father or Trump.
He is a unifier, said Skeadas, an investment manager at the First City Capital Management, a financial management firm in Savannah.
“Jim brings people together like nobody you’ve ever seen,” he said. “He has deep relationships with people from all walks of life that he’s met, that he grew up with, that lived in the neighborhood, that he went to school with, that he went to college with.”
Griffis, the former colleague at Partners Risk Services, believes Kingston is the best candidate to represent the district’s business interests in Washington.
“The Jim I know is someone who will go to D.C. and say, ‘Here’s what my district needs’,” said Griffis, currently a client advisor at the risk management firm of Sterling Seacrest Pritchard in Savannah.
Margaret Coker, The Current’s editor-in-chief, contributed reporting to this story.
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