Lieutenant Governor: Greg Dolezal, Josh McLaurin

Greg Dolezal (R)

Dolezal said he wants to lead collaboratively, an approach he says is informed by his experience as a business owner. Leading the Georgia Senate is similar to running a business, he said, with a few key differences.

“I don’t own the Senate in the same way that I own a business, and so it becomes even more important to understand the needs of the different people in the Legislature from different parts of the state, find commonality, and then move forward,” he said.

Dolezal said the passage of the Georgia Promise Scholarship, which allows qualifying families to use up to $6,500 in state funding for private school tuition or homeschooling, is a good example of lawmakers working together to achieve a common goal.

The measure passed with a mostly party-line vote, but he said it took collaboration with both chambers to get the bill to the governor’s desk in 2024 after years of failure.

“That bill went through a ton of different iterations just as we got input from both House and Senate members before it was ultimately passed,” he said.

Josh McLaurin (D)

McLaurin said he plans to lead by consensus and that his tenure in the state Legislature has shown that he knows how to work with lawmakers in his party and those across the aisle.

“I have built a reputation for building agreement behind the scenes and getting unlikely things done with bipartisan cooperation,” he said.

His efforts to secure funding for veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder and regulate car booting, he said, are both examples of his ability to work with lawmakers from both parties, to solve issues that impact Georgia residents.

“You have to be persuasive,” he said. “You have to go to your colleagues and approach them with respect and inform them about the issues, and then secure their cooperation. And that’s exactly what I did.”

His consensus-driven style, he said, was a large part of his pitch to voters in the Democratic primary.

“That type of bipartisan approach is exactly what voters are hungry for right now,” he said.

Greg Dolezal (R)

Dolezal said he would prioritize cutting government spending, arguing that the cost of funding the government — or paying taxes — is a burden for families.

“We can ensure that we right-size government and that we have that largest expense be an expense that is the most defensible when we look in the eyes of a Georgia family who is struggling to pay rent or buy groceries,” he said.

He also cited recent cuts to the state income tax, a series of gas tax suspensions and this year’s property tax refunds as examples of Georgia’s leaders making the state more affordable for residents.

“All of those things are directly putting money into the pockets of average Georgians,” he said. “From a state perspective, that’s probably the number one thing that we can do.”

Josh McLaurin (D)

McLaurin said addressing housing and healthcare costs would be his top priorities as lieutenant governor, citing rising numbers of uninsured Georgians.

“I am not only an advocate of expanding Medicaid under the ACA, which my opponent is not, but I’m an advocate for using state dollars to replace those lost subsidies and doing everything we can to stabilize access to care,” he said.

He also said he would advocate for “modest zoning and design standard reform,” as well as permitting reform, in an effort to bring down the cost of housing construction.

“It’s one thing to talk about these issues and to go in these rooms and say that you support better policies,” he said. “It’s another thing to show skin in the game and actually show up for the negotiations that will be required to do the heavy lifting to get the policies done.”

Greg Dolezal (R)

Dolezal acknowledged that Georgia has become a hub for data centers, but said that data center expansion in the state should not come at the expense of Georgia residents.

“I do not believe that average Georgians should be funding trillion-dollar companies in their economic endeavors,” he said. “Georgians’ power bills should go down, not up, as the result of data center development in the state.”

Dolezal said that while he does not support a moratorium on data centers, new projects should not involve non-disclosure agreements and information about potential data center projects should be readily available to residents.

“I think that those decisions should be made locally,” he said.

Josh McLaurin (D)

McLaurin said he would like to see the state significantly slow down, or potentially even pause, the construction of new data centers until lawmakers are able to put guardrails in place to protect the environment and Georgia residents.

“Family farms, which are already struggling to survive, are feeling immense economic pressure to sell their land to data centers,” he said. McLaurin said Georgians also need more transparency and certainty that the costs and long-term consequences of having data centers constructed in their communities won’t be passed on to them.

“Data centers, in some sense, are these monuments to rapid technological change with uncertain consequences,” McLaurin said. “And I think that people are appropriately skeptical of how fast we’re building out these projects, given that they could have these society-shaking consequences.”

Greg Dolezal (R)

Dolezal did not complete the endorsements section of the Georgia Recorder’s voter guide.

Josh McLaurin (D)

• U.S. Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff
• Former House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams
• Former Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor
• 60+ legislative colleagues including Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones and Senate Minority Whip Kim Jackson
• Former state Sen. Jason Carter
• Former Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler
• Former Georgia NAACP President James “Major” Woodall
• Georgia AFL-CIO
• Georgia Equality
• The Georgia Association of Black Women Attorneys
• The Young Democrats of Georgia
• The Georgia Association of Educators