Patricia Murphy: The 1st annual Cookie and Coal Awards for Georgia Politics

It’s been some year in Georgia politics. We started out with a sitting president running for reelection and a former president under indictment — and guess which one won the election?

Democrats raised millions, but mostly fizzled, while Republicans defied expectations and delivered a turnout machine few saw coming.

In a year with a dizzying array of highs and lows, I decided that a Santa-themed award is in order to rank the highs and lows on Christmas Day. The Cookie winners are being recognized for outstanding achievements in governance or sheer political survival. The Lumps of Coal are for those who even Santa would say need to make better choices.

And the Cookies go to:

• Georgia election workers. Four years after a contested election that included death threats for county election workers, the state’s election officials were back at it on election night 2024. Despite bomb threats, last-minute rules changes, 14-hour days and never-ending scrutiny leading up to the vote count, Georgians had mostly smooth voting and a clear presidential result before midnight.
• Kelly Loeffler and Georgia Republicans. I sat down with Loeffler a few months after her 2021 Senate election loss to U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock. Instead of going back to her and her husband’s successful business, she wanted to stay in the political world that had essentially just rejected her and create an infrastructure she said was missing when she ran. True to her plan, she spent millions of her own money to create a statewide political operation that helped Republicans across the state deliver a win for Donald Trump in Georgia this year. The reward? A nomination for a spot in Trump’s cabinet and lots of favors to fellow Republicans to call in down the road.
• Mayor Andre Dickens. Just six months ago, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens was knee-deep in a water crisis he didn’t cause — and a communications crisis of his own making when he remained out of town as pipes burst across the city. Add that to the battles he endured over Atlanta’s Public Safety Training Center, and Dickens seemed embattled and beleaguered. Now ending the year, the training center is built, the water has kept running (so far), and Dickens is heading into a 2025 election year without an obvious challenger in sight.
• President Jimmy Carter. There’s political survival and there’s actual survival, and Georgia’s own President Jimmy Carter has embodied the latter. The president from Plains turned 100 in September, voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in October, and continues to inspire people around the world with his example of service for the long haul.
• Herschel Walker. After a truly disastrous campaign loss to U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022, the former University of Georgia superstar mostly disappeared from public life. But a year and a half later, Walker quietly returned to Athens to complete his college degree at 62-years-old, proving this month that it’s never too late to take care of unfinished business. With diploma in hand, he’s now been tapped as Trump’s ambassador to the Bahamas.

The year in politics has delivered plenty of low points, too. And the 2024 Lumps of Coal go to:

• President Joe Biden. The aging president who promised to be a “transitional” leader in 2020 only helped transition the White House right back to Trump in 2024. Although Democrats insisted Biden was perfectly fine and ready for another four years, the president’s halting and confused performance on an Atlanta debate stage showed that wasn’t the case at all. Democrats’ last-minute swap for Vice President Kamala Harris denied voters a real primary contest — and gave the country the second Trump presidency that Biden warned about all along.
• The Georgia State Election Board. Never has the low-profile, unelected State Election Board wreaked so much havoc as it did this fall after Trump praised its new activist GOP majority by name at a Georgia rally. Trump’s “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory” went on to pass reams of sweeping, last-minute voting rule changes that sent election directors scrambling to adjust. Judges eventually overturned the most expansive rules, saying the board should stay in its lane, but the chaos and bad blood among board members remained.
• Georgia Democrats. Is Georgia really a swing state? State Democrats are pointing to a better-than-2020 vote total and two state House pickups to prove the 2024 elections weren’t so bad after all. But with a near-total statewide wipeout in 2022 and Trump winning the state this year, Democrats have lots of work to do — not just to prove Georgia is a swing state, but to really make it one in the first place.
• Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. What a year for Willis, who started out as a sort of MSNBC superhero for charging Trump in a sprawling Georgia election interference case, only to be disqualified from the case for having a secret romantic relationship with the special counsel she hired for the job. Weeks before the Trump case stalled in December, Willis’ other big racketeering case, against rapper Young Thug and a network of associates, fizzled out, too. The judge in that case criticized Fulton County’s “really poor lawyering” and legal experts called the longest-ever criminal trial in Georgia history a waste of time.
• Leaders of the Fulton County Jail. You’d think that after legal cases, federal investigations and state inquiries all found inhumane and unconstitutional conditions at the Fulton County Jail, somebody somewhere in leadership would start to really solve the problem. But you’d be wrong. County leaders say they need more money, lots of it, but a Department of Justice report said money alone won’t deal with what it called a culture of poor management and mistreatment. The jail now looks like it will require local, state and federal officials to contribute to a solution. Maybe the first president ever to be booked there can get the ball rolling once he’s sworn back into office in January.