Georgia Democrats try to forge a new path forward after Trump's victory
Ever since Hillary Clinton's surprising defeat last month, Rebecca DeHart's inbox has been flooded by messages with the same lament.
“They all say, ‘I wish I had done more,” DeHart, the state party’s executive director, recently told nearly 200 frustrated Democrats still licking their wounds after Donald Trump’s win at a post-election gathering.
It has been a brutal reckoning for the party. Sidelined for more than a decade, Democrats are no closer to regaining control of the Georgia Legislature than they were two years ago, when they had high hopes of flipping about a half-dozen state legislative seats. Or than they were two years before that. Or two years before that.
The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, businessman Jim Barksdale, mustered just 41 percent of the vote despite pumping more than $3 million of his own fortune into his campaign.
And Democrats have no clear leader – and more importantly, no unified direction – as Republicans prepare for their twelfth legislative session in a row with complete control of all of the gears of power in Georgia.
Read more about Democrats struggling to find a path forward after the election by clicking here.
About the Author
Greg Bluestein is the Atlanta Journal Constitution's chief political reporter. He is also an author, TV analyst and co-host of the Politically Georgia podcast.
