Nonpartisan elections like those held for the state Supreme Court race don’t usually attract much attention in Georgia.
But this year, with three sitting justices on the state’s highest court up for re-election, two attorneys backed by a slew of progressive organizations have launched high-profile campaigns, with the hope of shifting the balance of the court.
On paper, the elections are nonpartisan. However, the incumbent justices have accused their challengers of bringing partisan influences into the race. And without a party identifier to distinguish the candidates, political parties and figures on both sides of the race have established something of a shadow campaign, lining up behind candidates to demonstrate their support.
Now, with Election Day looming Tuesday, candidates are working overtime to get their message out to voters. A flurry of attack ads — and a last-minute secret filing against a state agency — are also shaking up the race.
Since these are nonpartisan races, they will be decided Tuesday rather than in November like other races on the May 19 ballot.
The candidates
The battle over the two seats began in February, when Miracle Rankin, a personal injury attorney and former president of the Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys, and Jen Jordan, a former Democratic state senator, announced their campaign for the seat.
Incumbent Justice Charlie Bethel, a former Republican state senator who has served on the court since 2018, is being challenged by Rankin, while Jordan is running against incumbent Justice Sarah Warren, who has also been on the court since 2018. Both justices were appointed by former GOP Gov. Nathan Deal.
Justices serve six-year terms and are often first appointed by governors in order to fill a vacancy on the court. The result is that eight of the nine justices who are currently serving on the state Supreme Court were appointed by Republican governors.
Quinn Yeargain, a professor who teaches constitutional law at Michigan State University and attended law school at Emory University, said that the court’s reluctance to take up some of the more high-profile issues in recent years may leave voters a little unclear on how justices would rule on a variety of key issues.
In 2023, the state Supreme Court sided with the state during what was considered a narrow legal challenge to Georgia’s abortion law. A lawsuit that addresses the constitutionality of Georgia’s six-week abortion ban more directly is currently pending in the state Supreme Court, though the justices ruled to keep the ban in place while the case played out.
“They have not decided on the merits whether the Georgia Constitution contains or does not contain the right to abortion,” Yeargain said. “They’ve not decided a lot of more high profile issues. And I think that that may be one of the only reasons that the court has held on to some perception of independence is because it just hasn’t been asked to decide certain questions, and it has selected to not answer certain questions.”
Still, the sitting justices who are up for re-election have maintained that they are fighting to maintain an impartial judiciary that is free from partisan influences.
Warren declined the Recorder’s request for an interview, but campaign advisor Heath Garrett called Jordan and Rankin’s campaign a “partisan attack on our nonpartisan Georgia Supreme Court.”
“Justice Warren enjoys widespread support from Democrats and Republicans alike because she’s committed to fairness and impartiality — not politics,” Garrett added.
Bethel defended his record as a justice, arguing that he has had to make decisions that didn’t align with his own personal beliefs while serving on the Supreme Court, but that doing so is part of the role of a justice.
“A judge is to hold people to the law that is, not the law that the judge would have,” Bethel said in an interview. “And so I believe that I’ve done that.”
Jordan and Rankin, on the other hand, have argued that their candidacies are about making the court more reflective of Georgia as a whole and standing up for the rights of all Georgians, not about partisan gain.
“It’s really important that you have judges on the bench who come from a vast background of experiences that are very representative of what Georgia looks like, and that the court is a reflection of the state,” Rankin said in an interview.
Recent rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, including an April decision that diluted the power of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, make state courts an even more important guardrail for democracy, Jordan added.
“Challenges involving people’s fundamental rights or civil rights, things like the right to vote, are going to come before the Georgia Supreme Court,” she said. “And so if people care about those issues and protecting the right to vote, or protecting the right to privacy, then they really need to pay attention to this election.”
But in a race that has captured the attention — and endorsements — of figures like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, voters may have a hard time buying the nonpartisan label.
Left-leaning groups, including the Democratic Party of Georgia, have sought to boost Jordan and Rankin’s campaigns. Planned Parenthood Votes launched a six-figure ad campaign to support Jordan and Rankin, casting the incumbent justices as “politicians in robes.”
Conservative organizations like Frontline Policy Action have been lining up behind Warren and Bethel. Kemp’s leadership committee, which has the ability to raise unlimited campaign funds and has often supported Republican candidates, also donated $8,400 to Bethel’s campaign during the most recent filing period, which ended on April 30.
Still, Bethel sharply rebuked claims that there had been partisanship on both sides of the race.
“It’s not even apples and oranges,” he said. “Those two things aren’t fruit. They’re not a comparison.”
Though Kemp has thrown his support behind the two sitting justices, Bethel said the difference between his campaign and that of the two challengers is “the material that’s being broadcast on television is actively purchased and funded and financed through a party.”
“To make that comparison of those being similar things seems to me a very significant stretch of the notion of what it means to be partisan and nonpartisan,” he said.
Yeargain, the Michigan State University professor, said accepting funds from elected officials and party leaders is “a common maneuver in judicial elections.”
Funding for the candidates is “coming from what we would say, broadly defined, is not the legal Republican Party, but the Republican Party’s infrastructure,” Yeargain said. “And the same is true of the Democratic side.”
Secret filings
In another twist in the race, Jordan and Rankin filed a complaint against the state’s Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is tasked with conducting hearings and investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by judges in Georgia.
The complaint was filed last month alongside an emergency motion to seal the filing, with the two candidates arguing that having to file the case publicly would cause them irreparable harm. They cited a case involving John Barrow, a 2024 state Supreme Court candidate whose campaign largely centered around protecting reproductive rights.
Barrow sued the same body in 2024 after receiving a letter stating that his campaign conduct may have violated state laws that prohibit judges from announcing which way they plan to rule on cases that could come before the Supreme Court.
A hearing in Jordan and Rankin’s case was held Monday in Albany, though it was closed to the public. Both candidates declined to comment on the case, but Jordan said in an interview Monday that she hoped there would be a resolution soon and that “once that happens, maybe we can have a broader conversation, but at this point in time, I’m constrained.”
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
This article appears in 2026 Elections: Candidate lists, news.
