She has run unsuccessfully for Coastal Georgia’s congressional seat four times. She was barred from practicing law in state and federal courts in the 2000s for professional misconduct. In her latest bid for the seat in 2024, she didn’t even run as a Democrat — she declared as an Independent but failed to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot.
Yet, in the race to decide the Democratic Party’s nominee to run against Republican Jim Kingston for the seat this fall, Joyce Griggs has the inside track. Someone many regarded as a political has-been before the race began defeated second-place finisher Amanda Hollowell by nearly 10 percent of the vote in the first round of primary voting last month. She came out ahead of Hollowell in 14 of Coastal Georgia’s 15 counties, including Chatham, the region’s most populous county.
A victory by the 74-year-old Griggs in the primary runoff on June 16 would be a testament to her endurance and longevity and mean a contest in November against the son of the man she ran against in her first bid for the seat more than a quarter century ago.
But no matter how one chooses to encapsulate Griggs’ accomplishments and failures, she remains, in her word, “tenacious,” despite her string of failed bids for Congress.
“I don’t give up. I don’t quit,” she told The Current GA in a recent interview.
Name recognition
How Griggs won the primary and stands poised to be the Democratic nominee in November is, at first glance, a riddle.
Besides an unsuccessful election history and professional setbacks that would crush the spirits of most others and send them into political retirement, she has campaigned on a shoestring, her latest filing to the Federal Elections Commission indicates.
As of May 27, she had a little over $4,000 in cash on hand after receiving some $6,300 in individual contributions and loaning her own campaign more than $30,600. She also reported more than $115,200 in debts and loans owed by her campaign committee, some dating back to her unsuccessful Congressional campaign in 2000.
Yet despite a minuscule budget, more than 19,694 Coastal Georgia Democrats cast their votes last month for Griggs to Hollowell’s 14,095 — a difference of 5,869 votes.
One reason for the outpouring of votes in the first round of voting is certainly name recognition. As the number of voters who pay little attention to political news grows — what political scientists have dubbed low-information voters — name recognition is paramount, especially in a primary. Even her opponents acknowledge that she had more of it, partly due, ironically, to the fact that she has kept running and falling short since her first defeat at the hands of Jim Kingston’s father, Jack, more than a quarter century ago.
‘Experience is a good teacher’
There are other factors for Griggs’ enduring popularity.
For one thing, second and even third and fourth acts are a time-honored tradition in U.S. politics. For another, Coastal Georgia’s weak Democratic Party organizations have failed to put forward more electable candidates or failed to support those they do.
Then there is the Republican stranglehold on the 1st Congressional District, where Donald Trump has won the last three presidential elections by an average of 14.3 percent of the vote. In recent election cycles, the prospects for a Democrat of winning the Coastal Georgia seat have been slim, no matter the candidate. So, biography, not electability, has become the benchmark for many Democratic primary voters.
While Griggs has many critics in Coastal Georgia’s Black community, her story, warts and all, resonates with a substantial number of Black women and men who make up most Democratic Party primary voters in the region.
A daughter of sharecroppers in North Carolina. Awarded a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in counseling at North Carolina Central University in Durham. A U.S. Army intelligence analyst was deployed to Iraq three times. Earned a law degree from John Marshall Law School in Atlanta while in the Army Reserves.
“Bottom line, for Black people, Joyce is the best choice,” said 49-year-old Sharonda Wilkes, a Brunswick resident.
Wilkes said she is voting for Griggs in the runoff because “experience is a good teacher,” and Griggs’ experience uniquely qualifies her to recognize and fight for imperiled civil rights.
That ascent from hardscrabble beginnings is why she says she is positioned among the candidates to understand the struggles and economic pain that many Coastal Georgians are enduring.
“They’re hurting, and I know I can appeal to those people. Also, don’t look at me as a woman, don’t look at me as a Black woman — look at me as a champion, somebody that wants to take you across that finish line,” she said.
Griggs’ insistence that her disbarments were not the product of her own mistakes but of racist judges hits home with the encounters of many Black families with the criminal justice system. Even those professional setbacks are redemptive, she insists.
“I continued to serve. I intensified my service to the people of this district, and I was asked to return to the military because they needed intelligence officers in Iraq. I did, and I continued to serve my country and my community.”
Showing up
Perhaps the biggest reason for Griggs’ enduring popularity among many of Coastal Georgia’s Democratic voters is something increasingly rare in an era of political campaigning and activism by social media: She shows up.
Over the years, the woman known as “J.G.” to her friends has traveled the roads of the district beyond the Democratic strongholds of Chatham and Liberty more than any other candidate, offering her help to people and progressive causes.
What she does has not always been clear or measurable. Serve as a sounding board for communities in hardship? Provide advice for navigating the government bureaucracy to secure aid? Offer to serve as an intermediary with those bureaucracies?
Last week, however, there was one place where Griggs did not show up — a decision that underscored how she views the source of her strength as a candidate.
She decided to forgo a televised candidate forum with Hollowell in Atlanta and instead met with residents in Brantley County, which is still trying to recover from a recent wildfire that devastated their properties and livelihoods.
There, she advised residents of still trying to recover from recent wildfires that devastated their properties and livelihoods on how to get government and private help, according to Michael McCord, a former rival for the Democratic nomination who is now supporting Griggs and who attended the gathering.
“A lot of people know me. I am a household name to some because they know the work that I have done in this district. It’s just not running for office. It’s a continuous process.”
This article appears in 2026 Elections: Candidate lists, news.
