Jason Carter isn’t exactly brooding after this month’s stinging election defeat.

Two weeks after he was roundly beaten by Gov. Nathan Deal, the state senator from Atlanta talked about building upon the network of supporters his campaign cultivated across Georgia. He spoke of a campaign that “moved the ball gigantically down the field” for his party and cast his loss as a consequence of a national GOP wave.

And although he’s not committing to another run for office, he’s certainly not closing the door on one.

“We’ll see. The world changes. Two years is an eternity in politics, and four years is two eternities,” Carter told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in his first interview since his defeat. “You don’t know. But I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.”

Georgia Democrats hoped that demographic changes, a tide of financial support and the famous pedigrees of Carter and Michelle Nunn, the party’s U.S. Senate candidate, would be enough to turn the deep-red state to a shade of purple. But both Democrats earned only 45 percent of the vote.

In hindsight, Carter said, the GOP’s success in Georgia may have been inevitable. The only thing he would have done differently, he said, would have been to schedule his November 2013 announcement a few months earlier.

“Ultimately, I don’t think anything anyone could have done from a campaign strategy point would have changed the outcome,” he said. “You see that nationwide.”

The Democrat attacked Deal with an education-first message that accused the Republican of failing to fully fund the k-12 system. The governor countered by contending that Carter would inevitably be forced to raise taxes to pay for a sustained increase in the classrooms budget.

Even in defeat, Carter said his campaign agenda, which also included calls for an ethics overhaul and a system to track the effectiveness of tax cuts, has helped shape Georgia’s political debate for the next four years.

“You see the results from an issues standpoint, just in what the discussion is about at the state level,” he said. “Right now it’s about education funding, it’s about how we get an economy that works for regular people, and ethics reform is at the top of everybody’s agenda.”

Carter said he still has not decided what he’ll do next, but he said he has plenty of options. For now, he said, he’s adjusting to a return to family life and a new puppy — a campaign promise to his two children.

If Carter does run again, he would join a number of Democrats in Georgia to give it another try. Chief among them is his grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, who lost his bid for governor in 1966 before claiming victory in 1970 — a win that helped propel him to the White House.

Could his grandson again follow those footsteps by running for governor a second time?

“I’m not ruling it out. And I’ll certainly commit to having a role in this debate that we’ve started and the future of politics in this state,” Carter said. “And whether that puts me on the ballot again is a question that has to be answered later. I’m not going anywhere.”