Amanda Hollowell was in her element.
Speaking at a candidate forum at the West Broad YMCA in Savannah on Saturday, the first-time candidate for Coastal Georgia’s seat in Congress trumpeted the “intergenerational, multiracial coalition” supporting her candidacy.
“My youngest staff member is 19, my oldest volunteer is 86, and we are all showing up together. We have over 200 volunteers and around 300 individual donors,” Hollowell told some two-dozen people attending the forum, sponsored by the Hungry Club.
“These folks go out and advocate for me. They go to neighborhood associations and have conversations. They’re also texting and reaching out on social media to their friends, families, and neighbors,” she said, as her opponent in the race, Joyce Griggs, looked on.
Hollowell’s supporters will have to do that — and more — as early voting gets underway on Monday for the primary runoff to decide which Democrat will face Republican Jim Kingston in November in the open race for Coastal Georgia’s seat in U.S. Congress.
The 47-year-old Hollowell came in second behind Griggs, a four-time candidate, by nearly 10 percent of the vote in the first round of primary voting last month. Griggs was the top vote-getter in 13 out of Coastal Georgia’s counties; Hollowell won only Glynn.
But there are no signs that Hollowell, chief of legislative campaigns for Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, is worried. Far from it. The chief of legislative campaigns for Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, says she knows how to organize.
“I’ve had experience of turning out hundreds of thousands of folks, millions of people, to vote.”
Getting supporters back to the polls
During the campaign, Hollowell and Griggs have largely hewed to conventional party talking points in this mid-term election year: health care, affordability, Trump administration corruption, and the U.S. and Israel’s protracted war with Iran.
With little to distinguish them in terms of policy, their biggest challenge as they enter the runoff to decide who will face the Republican nominee, Jim Kingston, in November, is voter turnout.
There were 57,159 Democratic ballots cast in the first round of voting in the primary. That turnout is almost certain to drop precipitously in the runoff. In 2022, for instance, more than half — 53.8 percent — of the Democrats who cast ballots in the 1st Congressional District Democratic primary did not do so for the runoff.
The question is: Who is best positioned with staff and money to corral their first-round supporters back to the polls?
In Hollowell’s case, the task plays to her strengths, in a race that has partly become a proxy contest between so-called establishment Democrats represented by Hollowell and party dissidents represented by Griggs.
In a recent interview with The Current, the California native who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in American studies, described as an “amazing experience” her involvement at Color of Change.
Before that, she was senior director at When We All Vote, an organization co-founded by former first lady Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett, former White House senior adviser to then-President Barack Obama, and from 2020 until 2021, director of campaigns for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute.
She makes no apologies for her association with When We All Vote and the so-called “Obama network,” whose namesake has been demonized by President Donald Trump and his administration.
“What I got from that organization was a game plan to understand how to talk to voters and how to get them to come back and show up. I’m not going to walk away from that because the name on it says ‘Obama’.”
Alongside her professional successes, Hollowell has experienced personal hardship.
In April, at a candidate forum sponsored by the Atlanta Press Club, one of her rivals for the nomination, Michael McCord, accused her of financial mismanagement.
In response, she said she had been an underemployed mother of a young son and who, in an unspecified number of instances, had been late with rent to a “slumlord of a landlord,” who repeatedly threatened her with eviction. I “own” it, she said.
Who stands more to gain from endorsements?
Hollowell is counting on a bevy of endorsements from prominent local Democrats to help catapult her to victory in the runoff.
Savannah Indivisible, the Georgia Working Families Party, Black Voters Action PAC, and Moms Demand Action are among the organizations that have endorsed Hollowell.
So have Savannah Mayor Van Johnson and Elijah “Bobby” Henderson, founder and executive director of A Better Glynn, along with a host of prominent local Democrats, including former Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson, state Sen. Derek Mallow, state Reps. Anne Allen Westbrook and Edna Jackson, and former Democratic congressional candidates Wade Herring and Patti Hewitt.
But if endorsements from losing rivals for the nomination are anything to go by, it is Griggs, not Hollowell, who stands to gain more votes in the runoff.
Griggs has received the endorsements of Sharon Stokes-Williamson, Michael McCord and Defonsio Daniels. They combined for 17,000 votes in the first round, or 29.4 percent of the total vote.
Meanwhile, Pat Wilver and Randy Zurcher have endorsed Hollowell. They combined for 5,520 votes in the first round, or 9.7 percent of the total vote.
Still, overtaking Griggs and that nearly 10-point deficit in the runoff may not be as daunting a task as it first appears.
No one knows that better than Griggs herself. Four years ago, Griggs won the first round of primary voting by 10.6 percent of the vote over Herring, a Savannah attorney.
In the runoff, she lost by 23.9 percent of the vote — a 34.5 percent swing.
This article appears in 2026 Elections: Candidate lists, news.
