Georgia Peanut Commission chair is latest Republican to back Jon Ossoff
Today’s newsletter highlights
- Raphael Warnock addresses 2028 speculation.
- CJ Pearson canvases frat houses for Mike Collins.
- Republicans ask State Election Board for emergency action.
Blurred lines
Donald Chase is the kind of voter Democrats are fighting over in Georgia.
The Oglethorpe peanut farmer has voted Republican for nearly his entire adult life. He’s supporting and contributing to GOP candidates elsewhere on the November ballot.
But when it comes to the U.S. Senate race, he plans to vote for Democratic incumbent Jon Ossoff.
“We don’t necessarily elect a party,” Chase said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I like to support people that I can get behind and believe in.”
Chase is chair of the Georgia Peanut Commission, which represents more than 4,000 peanut farm families across the state, though he stressed that he is speaking only for himself and not the organization.
He is the latest Republican to back Ossoff as the Democrat works to build a coalition that stretches beyond his party’s base in his reelection fight against Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins.
Republican mayors Scott James Matheson of Valdosta and Julie Smith of Tifton crossed party lines for Ossoff while supporting Republican nominee for governor Rick Jackson. Former Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona also endorsed Ossoff.
Chase said his support for Ossoff is rooted in the Democrat’s attention to farmland issues during his first term, but one episode stood out in particular.
Ossoff pressed to preserve U.S. funding for UNICEF, the federal program that distributes peanut-based food to malnourished children overseas. Chase said that fight mattered to him even though the Democrat failed to reverse the Trump administration’s cuts.
“He stood up and said, ‘This is not appropriate,” Chase said. “I like people who will stand up for the things that I believe we, as Georgians, support.”
Things to know
Good morning! The midterms are in 36 days. You have one week left to register to vote. Here are three things to know for today:
- Defense attorneys are asking federal judges to block the U.S. Marshals Service from moving pretrial detainees from metro Atlanta to a facility in Irwin County, Reed Williams reports.
- Federal prosecutors are targeting three alleged noncitizen voters in Georgia as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to seek and prosecute people who are noncitizens ahead of the midterms, David Wickert and Caleb Groves report.
- Senate Majority Leader John Thune has reinforced national Republicans’ backing of Collins, despite controversies surrounding the Georgia Republican’s Senate campaign and his lagging poll numbers, Riley Bunch reports.
Pushback
Republicans are pushing back hard on Politico’s report last week that the National Republican Senatorial Committee was deprioritizing Georgia and North Carolina, with NRSC Chair Tim Scott calling it “100% fake news.”
That nods to an important reality: Republicans aren’t about to leave Collins for dead against Ossoff, who continues to hold significant leads in polls.
Even if many Republicans are counting Collins out, the party needs him to energize MAGA voters who could help GOP candidates up and down the ticket. That’s largely what Collins is trying to do with a campaign focused heavily on the party’s base, even as Jackson and other Republicans make a more concerted play for the middle.
Still, there are signs of a shift in resources.
The latest came over the weekend, when the Senate GOP-aligned Senate Leadership Fund canceled roughly $630,000 in Georgia ad reservations. The group, which separately snapped up $1.7 million in airtime last week, previously characterized another six-figure cancellation as an effort to optimize viewership.
2028 watch
“We’ll see what happens.”
That’s what U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock said at the Texas Tribune Fest on Friday when asked whether he’ll run for president in 2028.
Some Georgia insiders have long seen Warnock as more likely to launch a 2028 bid than Ossoff, who has repeatedly rejected such talk.
Warnock is clearly leaving the door open.
Former Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also had a lot to say about her time in Congress during a separate panel on Thursday. She said that she was still America First, but “MAGA is dead.”
“Trump has lied so much to us and betrayed us so incredibly beyond any of my comprehension,” she told the crowd.
Campus campaigning
Collins did some campaigning at the University of Georgia’s football game with an assist from conservative influencer CJ Pearson.
Pearson is hosting tailgate parties at fraternity houses of schools inside swing states as part of an effort to increase turnout among young conservative voters.
“While the President holds down the fort in Knoxville at Tennessee vs Texas today, Georgia’s next Senator @MikeCollinsGA and I held it down at UGA,” Pearson wrote on X. “We’re going to save America one fraternity party and tailgate at a time.”
His post included video of students wearing the familiar red Make America Great Again hats.
Prior to UGA, Pearson’s Next250 political committee’s Great American Tailgate Tour stopped at Florida State University with an event in support of Florida candidate for governor Byron Donalds.
It is not clear if Collins made it to the frat house. But he did post photos from the game and general tailgating on his social media.
Secret ballot
A fight over the secrecy of Georgia ballots has been brewing for weeks. Now, the Republican National Committee and Georgia Republican Party are turning up the pressure.
In a Friday letter, the organizations asked the State Election Board to take emergency action before early voting. They cited a Princeton researcher who says he exploited a long-known privacy flaw in Georgia’s voting system to determine, with fair certainty, how more than 2,200 people who cast early ballots voted in the May primaries.
They want the board to adopt rules requiring voters to deposit ballots in bins, not scanners. Officials would shuffle batches of ballots deposited into the bins and later insert them into scanners.
“The right to a secret ballot is foundational, as exemplified by its enshrinement in the state constitution,” the letter said. “It is a bulwark against voter coercion, intimidation, and retaliation, protecting the fairness of the franchise.”
The request comes as the State Election Board meets today in Suwanee. In August, the board rejected a proposal to force the secretary of state to implement an update, with some members citing timeline concerns and questioning whether the board had the authority to require the secretary to act.
The privacy flaw has become easier to exploit with artificial intelligence, security experts say. The flaw does not allow votes to be altered.
The secretary of state’s office has said an upgrade that reportedly resolves the vulnerability is too costly and infeasible to implement in time for the midterms. To ensure election records cannot be used to identify how someone voted, state officials have said they are working with vendors to scramble records before making them public.
They also have directed county officials to redact some publicly available information, deny requests for other information and route some requests to the secretary’s office.
Listen up
Today on the “Politically Georgia” podcast Greg Bluestein and Patricia Murphy answer questions from listeners about the governor’s race, Cobb County school board politics, the impact of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions on Georgia’s foster care system and what to expect from the next AJC-UGA poll.
You can listen and subscribe to “Politically Georgia” for free on Apple Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Abortion on the ballot
Planned Parenthood Votes, a political committee tied to the health provider most known for its advocacy for abortion rights, said it intends to knock on 40,000 doors in Georgia to boost voter turnout by focusing on the effects of the state’s abortion restrictions.
The group has been critical of Jackson, who said he supports Georgia’s law banning abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, which experts say happens at about six weeks of pregnancy.
“He’s promising to double down on banning abortion and punishing doctors for giving patients lifesaving care — all while the number of pregnant women dying from easily treatable conditions climbs,” Planned Parenthood Votes executive director Sarah Standiford said in a news release earlier this month. “Georgians can stand up for women and families by rejecting Rick Jackson.”
The group has also criticized Collins, the Republican nominee for Senate, who was among nearly 200 members of Congress that supported an effort to ban access to mifepristone, one of the drugs used in medicated abortions.
Standiford said in a news release that the latest canvassing effort will focus on “highlighting the dangerous records of anti-abortion Republican candidates down the ballot.”
Today in Washington
- President Donald Trump will make an announcement from the Oval Office at 2 p.m.
- The U.S. Senate could take a final vote on the Protect College Sports Act.
- The House is out until after the midterm elections.
Shoutouts
Today’s birthdays:
- Former state Rep. James Beverly.
- Will Bradley, government relations lead for Lockheed Martin.
Want a birthday shoutout in the Politically Georgia newsletter? There’s a form for that. It’s not just birthdays. We’re also interested in new jobs, engagements, birth announcements, etc.
Before you go
In the latest “where they stand” series, the AJC looks at what the major party candidates for governor support in healthcare policy.
That’ll do it for us today. As always, you can send your best scoops, gossip and insider information to greg.bluestein@ajc.com, tia.mitchell@ajc.com, patricia.murphy@ajc.com and adam.beam@ajc.com.