Josh McKoon, Georgia GOP chair, is betting on the Republican base in 2026
Republicans are gathering in Dallas, Texas, this week for their first midterm convention. Georgia’s delegation is led by Josh McKoon, the chair of the state party, who is looking to replicate President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory in Georgia despite the president’s increasing unpopularity here.
But unlike some Republican naysayers, McKoon sees Trump as Republicans’ biggest asset in Georgia. And he sees a midterm election that won’t be decided by “some mythical group that’s undecided,” but by the die-hard Republicans who want to help Trump keep as much power as possible in Republican hands.
“Obviously President Trump’s not going to be on the ballot,” McKoon said in an interview last week. “Our position has been we want the president to come to Georgia as much as he possibly can. We want those low-propensity voters to see that he’s here and that he’s asking for them to help us to complete the job.”
A lawyer by training, McKoon won the party chair’s job in 2023, only to inherit a party in disarray. Its previous chair, David Shafer, had been indicted along with Trump on since-dismissed election interference charges. And the state party’s losing grudge match against popular GOP Gov. Brian Kemp during the 2022 primary only proved its irrelevance.
But McKoon quickly changed course. He raised money and worked to unite the GOP’s deeply divided factions. He promised to be “relentlessly positive” and has mostly achieved that.
“The first thing I wanted to do is to reach out to all of our elected officials, just to say, ‘We want to have a good relationship with you. We are here to be of service,’” he said. “It was sort of like repairing a plane while you were flying the plane, but we managed to make that work.”
Along with burying the hatchet between Kemp and the party organization that had actively campaigned against him, McKoon also worked with the Trump campaign to help win the state in 2024. Republicans won, not by turning out moderate voters for Trump, but by running up GOP margins in the state’s already conservative strongholds.
“The assumption we took in 2024 is there are this many people on the ‘R’ team, this many people on the ‘D’ team, and we’ve got to get more of our people to actually complete the play of going to vote,” McKoon said. “I see the 2026 election in much the same way.”
But that’s not how all Republicans see it, most notably Rick Jackson, the party’s billionaire nominee for governor. Jackson is running a campaign completely apart from the state party, with a major focus on turning out the same kind of moderate and independent voters who split their tickets to elect both Kemp and Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022.
While there is communication at the staff level between the Jackson and state party teams, Jackson and McKoon have still never met to discuss the campaign and have only spoken once when they recently crossed paths at a GOP event.
“We shook hands and had a two-minute, cordial chat,” McKoon said, without criticizing Jackson.
“It’s up to every candidate to decide how they’re going to run their campaign,” he said. “He’s obviously invested an enormous amount of his own money and his effort. He’s got a strategy that he and his advisers are working through.”
Asked about McKoon and the state party’s plans this cycle, a spokesperson for Jackson only said that the campaign had “nothing to add.”
Despite Jackson’s hands-off approach toward the state party, McKoon said it’s crucial for Republicans to unite behind Jackson heading into November — and that includes Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. Jones has not only failed to endorse Jackson since losing to him in the GOP primary, he has said he may not vote for Jackson at all.
“I think it’s really important in every election that all Republicans are rowing in the same direction,” McKoon said of the bad blood between Jackson and Jones. “The key to this election is getting everyone on your team excited about turning out and voting. Every high-profile Republican is important to achieve that.”
He also warned that Republicans should not underestimate former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee for governor, whom he called “very intelligent” and “good on the stump.”
“I think it would be a big, big mistake to just say she can be reduced to the issues around the management of the city during the unrest in the summer of 2020,” he said. “We’ve got to have a more robust conversation about why do I want to vote for Republicans.”
Unlike Jackson, McKoon is in regular contact with the Republicans’ other top nominee, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, who is challenging Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Although Collins has been dogged by staff and family scandals, McKoon said he thinks Collins “took care of that as soon as he became aware of that.”
“I’m fully supportive of our entire Republican ticket, including Congressman Collins,” McKoon said. “I don’t know anybody that works harder than Mike Collins. He’s out there every day doing what he needs to do to put himself in position to win.”
Heading into Election Day with a full-time staff of 30, the state party now has two main functions. First, deploying a statewide field operation to turn out the pro-Trump, low-propensity voters ahead of Election Day. The second is a “Protect the Vote” effort to organize hundreds of volunteer attorneys for potential election challenges.
“Politics being what it is, and this state being as competitive as it is, you can’t guarantee an outcome,” he said. “But we’re doing everything we can to get there.”
The reality for Republicans is that Trump’s choices between now and the election will affect their chances in Georgia far more than their party chair’s decisions. But they can at least rest assured that McKoon is working to get the whole GOP ticket elected, whether they want the help or not.