Jay Bookman
Georgia’s 2026 Republican primary won’t be held until next May, but Sen. Jon Ossoff already knows who he’ll be running against:
Donald Trump.
“Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it: Ripe target,” Ossoff recently told a campaign crowd. “But here’s the thing: He’s a crook, and a con man. And he wants to be a king.”
In 2017, in his first congressional race, Ossoff failed to take on Trump directly and lost. It appears he won’t make that mistake again.
“Our fight is against deeply entrenched corruption and greed,” he said. “Corruption and greed that have so deeply rotted our system that it gave rise to this depraved man who has now plagued our public life for a decade.”
Georgia Republicans seem equally avid to make Trump the central issue of the 2026 midterms. The handful of declared and undeclared candidates for the GOP Senate nomination are unanimous in expressing their bottomless, unconditional loyalty to Trump, as they have to be.
Anything Trump wants, they want. If he wants something entirely different tomorrow, tomorrow they will want that, too.
Even in state and local races, Trump and his policies are going to dominate the upcoming campaign season, in large part because of the passage of what Trump calls his “big, beautiful bill.” The scope and reach of that legislation are enormous, creating significant challenges for the Georgia economy and Georgia’s political leadership.
For example, the $1 trillion in cuts that the bill makes in Medicaid will, in time, strip health insurance from hundreds of thousands of Georgians, many of them living in rural areas of the state where hospitals, doctors and other health care providers are already having a tough time hanging on. Private insurance is scarce in those areas, and if the government isn’t paying the health care bills, no one will and providers will disappear.
And if Congress also refuses to extend health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act by the end of the year, as seems likely, hundreds of thousands of additional Georgians will fall off the rolls of the insured, all to help finance major tax cuts for the wealthy.
Georgia, with an estimated $15 billion in reserves, could help soften that blow. However, a Republican state leadership that has long refused to expand Medicaid, making Georgia one of only 10 states that still do so, isn’t likely to undergo some sudden change of heart to help less affluent constituents stay insured. That could become a major issue in next year’s campaign, from state legislative races to the competition for governor.
Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” also slashes support for electric vehicles and other renewable energy projects, with experts warning that it will raise utility bills in Georgia.
Under another provision of that bill, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is given an additional $75 billion, which will allow it to more than double the number of agents it can put on the streets, from the current 6,000 to 16,000.
The clear intention of the Trump regime is to greatly accelerate the pace of immigration raids, with immense consequences for the carpet industries of north Georgia, the construction and service industries of metro Atlanta and the agriculture industry of south Georgia.
As we’ve all witnessed, ICE has not exactly comported itself with reason, moderation or humanity in its mass deportation effort, and much of the Republican base is fine with that.
It’s hard to exert discipline or restraint on an agency that operates behind masks, which means no agents can be held accountable for their excesses and mistakes.
“I’ve heard it from people at every level, including people with power, people with status, people with resources,” Ossoff said. “They come to my office, and they tell me they’re afraid to say anything. They’re afraid of retribution, investigation, destruction, vengeance from their own government.”
That’s not my America. Is it your America?
Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He now writes for the Georgia Recorder at Georgiarecorder.com.