Thanks to a massive fundraising advantage, President Trump’s endorsement, and his well-known last name, Jim Kingston was expected to be the top vote-getter in the Republican primary race to become Coastal Georgia’s next congressman.
The only question was whether he would win enough votes Tuesday to avoid a runoff. He did, picking up 52.7% of the more than 70,000 votes cast, followed by former Chatham County Commissioner Patrick Farrell with 17.25% and Appling County’s Kandiss Taylor with 12.5% in the six-candidate field.
The 35-year-old son of longtime U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston will now face either Joyce Griggs or Amanda Hollowell in the open race to succeed six-term U.S. Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter. The congressman from St. Simons rejected what likely would have been seventh House term in favor of a bid for the U.S. Senate, which fell short Tuesday.
Kingston will be heavily favored no matter who he faces in the general election in November. No Democrat has won Coastal Georgia’s seat in Congress since the elder Kingston did so 34 years ago.
“The general election is a choice — two different visions for southeast Georgia — and I believe conservative leadership will prevail,” Kingston told the crowd of family, friends and supporters after the results of the primary election became clear.
Resonance
Griggs was the top vote-getter in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for the 1st District Congressional seat, despite four previous failed bids for the job, including one as an independent, in 2024.
The daughter of a sharecropper and a U.S. Army veteran and lawyer by training, Griggs was also disbarred by a U.S. federal court in 2001 and accused of an improper filing by the Federal Elections Commission in 2021.
Yet she has crafted a narrative around those setbacks and her recovery from them that resonates with Democratic primary voters in Coastal Georgia, the majority of whom are Black women.
Her persistence and name recognition were evident Tuesday, as she won 34.55% of the 57,117 votes cast in the primary contest, followed by 24.66% for Hollowell, 7.0% for Pat Wilver, and 5.5% for Michael McCord in the eight-candidate field.
In Liberty County, one of two Democratic strongholds in Coastal Georgia, along with Chatham, Griggs won a whopping 47.7% of the 5,925 primary votes cast to Hollowell’s 18.6%, according to unofficial results.
She and Hollowell, chief of campaigns for Color of Change, which describes itself on its website as “the nation’s largest online racial justice organization,” will now face off in a primary runoff on June 16.
The winner of that contest will face a juggernaut, according to Kingston.
“We did not just run a campaign — we built the best organization in the country” and raised more money “than any open-seat candidate,” he said in his remarks Tuesday.
It has also been a very carefully curated campaign, which has taken full advantage of the size of its war chest, the president’s endorsement, and the candidate’s name recognition to avoid unscripted moments and side-by-side appearances with his rivals for the nomination.
It has also been a campaign that has presented a very manicured portrait of Kingston — saying, for instance, that he attended the University of Georgia when, in fact, he did not graduate, according to university officials.
This article appears in 2026 Elections: Candidate lists, news.
