The earthquake that rocked Georgia politics to their core on Election Day did not extend to the congressional race between Republican Jim Kingston and Democrat Amanda Hollowell in Coastal Georgia.
But it was a pretty strong tremor.
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In unofficial results, Kingston was leading Hollowell by 7,751 votes, or 2.8% of the ballots cast on Wednesday.The unofficial tally marks the closest a Republican has come to losing Coastal Georgia’s congressional seat — and a Democrat has come to gaining it — since Jim Kingston’s father, Jack, first won it in 1992.
However, Kingston’s path to become Coastal Georgia’s 35th representative to Congress, succeeding six-term Congressman Buddy Carter, was far more difficult than most local Democrats, and even some Republicans, expected.
Hollowell said she would await the certification of the vote before deciding whether to challenge the results, including the option requesting a recount.
“We want to make sure that every ballot is counted and that everything is certified. Once that happens, we’ll evaluate the circumstances and then decide what’s appropriate,” she said. Georgia’s secretary of state has until Nov. 20 to certify the results of Tuesday’s elections.
Another decisive outcome
Since Jack Kingston first went to Congress, Democrats have lost the congressional elections to Republicans by an average of 27 points. In three of those elections, the party did not even put forward a candidate.
In June, all indications pointed to a similarly decisive outcome for Jim Kingston, 36, in the general election race against Hollowell.
Kingston, an insurance broker, was on a roll, having won a resounding first-round primary victory in May, in which he defeated his closest rival in a six-candidate field by 35 points and avoiding a runoff.
Besides a last name known across the district, Kingston enjoyed a campaign cash advantage of nearly 10-to-1 over Hollowell. He raised more than $2.3 million; she, just over $227,000, while loaning her campaign $32,000 of her own funds.
In the primary and again in the general election, Kingston emphasized his work ethic. That pitch was aimed at least partly to counter suggestions by his rivals and skeptics that his campaign unduly benefited financially and politically from the network of friends, donors and clients that his father has amassed, first as a longtime member of Congress and more recently a lobbyist with a prominent Washington lobbying firm.
That relationship would later become the focus of a pointed billboard campaign in the Chatham area organized by former Democratic congressional candidate, Randy Zurcher, and entitled “Nepo Baby Kingston.”
Meanwhile, Hollowell, a veteran community organizer, played to her supporters viewed as her strength.
With little backing from the state Democratic Party, the 47-year-old veteran community organizer built what she called a “intergenerational, multiracial coalition,” relying heavily on social media and some 200 volunteers to make the case for her candidacy, especially in Glynn, Liberty and Chatham counties.
Trump factor
What neither candidate could account for — and appears to have been a major factor in making the race unexpectedly close — was Donald Trump.
Kingston embraced Trump during the campaign, telling Republican voters ahead of the primary in May that he wanted to go to Washington to help the president advance his agenda, a prudent pitch in a district that has handed Trump double-digit victories in the past three presidential elections.
The president endorsed Kingston in April, three weeks after Kingston aired a campaign ad in which he described the president’s reelection as a life raft for the country and a month before the critical party primary.
To be sure, Kingston was hardly alone among Republican candidates in this election cycle in betting their political futures on Trump.
But what may have been a boon to Kingston’s candidacy in April seems to have become a liability for him and other Georgia Republicans five months later, as early voting began and the president’s popularity plummeted amid rising food and fuel prices caused by his decision to go to war in Iran.
Trump again championed Kingston on the eve of Tuesday’s elections, describing him in a post on Truth Social as “a very successful Businessman, Civic Leader, and Conservative Activist” who “has dedicated his life to serving his Community” and is the son of the “GREAT Former Congressman from Georgia.”
Hollowell, Trump wrote, is “Reckless, Radical, and Dangerous!”
Sounding such alarms may have spurred fearful Republicans to the polls. But if early voting totals are anything to go by, they also appear to have energized Democrats.
Second-guesses and promises
The unexpectedly narrow outcome of the Kingston-Hollowell race is certain to produce sighs of relief among Republicans and second-guessing among Democrats.
The Democratic Party may rue its failure to give Hollowell’s campaign all but token support in an election in which Black women became an even more potent force in the state’s politics.
Hollowell herself may lament not spending more time getting out the vote in Effingham County where she got only 32.9% of the vote in a county roiling in political turmoil over a plan to build a $20 billion data center near Rincon.
Another political upstart, Democrat David Dillie, won a state House seat in a huge upset over Republican incumbent Bill Hitchens.
Assuming Kingston takes the 1st Congressional District seat in Congress, he will be tested in the months ahead over the pledge he made in the closing days of his campaign and again after polls closed at a gathering of supporters and well-wishers at Savannah Station — a pledge that was in sharp contrast to this carefully curated campaign that avoided large, diverse and possibly critical audiences.
“No matter what party you belong to, where you live, or what your background is, even if you don’t agree with everything I say, just know you’re going to have somebody up in our nation’s capital working tirelessly, making sure that Southeast Georgia remains the greatest place to live,” he said, with his father and mother Libby Morris, looking on.
In his victory speech, Kingston did not mention Trump. The basis of his candidacy’s appeal to Coastal Georgia voters, he said, was his call for good governance.
“So many of y’all here tonight ignored conventional thinking and said, ‘What is we went back to a better time, when American government functioned properly?'”
“Tonight, southeast Georgia showed the country that we are above politics as usual.”
With reporting from Adithi Vimalanathan and Sarah Harwell
