The GOP has managed to maintain its narrow majority in the House of Representatives after a Republican won a Georgia special election, but Democrats managed to make significant gains in the district. Republican Clay Fuller was elected in a special election runoff challenge Tuesday to succeed former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene representing Georgia’s 14th congressional district. Greene retired from Congress in January amidst a public feud with President Donald Trump and had more than a year left to her term, which Fuller will now complete.
Fuller, a lawyer and former White House fellow, has served as district attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit since 2020, when he was defeated in the Republican primary to represent Georgia’s 14th district by Greene. In a Fox News interview, the victorious Fuller touted Trump’s endorsement as a “key factor in us winning.” Suggesting that Trump’s endorsement made all the difference in his race against Shawn Harris, he added, “Our results prove that President Trump means a ton to Georgia-14.”
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However, Fuller won the district by a narrower margin than had been expected, achieving nearly 56% of the vote against Harris’s 44%. That 12-point margin is less than half of the nearly-30-point margin by which Greene defeated Harris in 2024 (64.4% to 35.6%) and less than a third of the 37-point margin by which Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election that same year. Greene was initially elected in 2020, winning roughly three quarters of the vote after Democratic opponent Kevin Van Ausdal moved to Indiana and thus became ineligible to represent Georgia. She was re-elected in 2022 with about two thirds of the vote, defeating Democrat Marcus Flowers.
In the first round of voting in this year’s special election, Harris, a retired Army brigadier general and cattle farmer, actually came out on top, with about 38% of the vote, while Fuller trailed closely behind with nearly 35% of the vote. Harris also led all of his competitors in fundraising, amassing a war chest of nearly $4.3 million. Since neither Fuller nor Harris won more than 50% of the vote, the race went to a runoff, where Fuller benefited from being the sole Republican candidate, when he had been one of 12 GOP contenders in the first round of voting. Harris, meanwhile, only had to grapple with two other Democrats in the first round.
Democrats were quick to hail Harris’s overperformance in Georgia’s “reddest district” as a sign of dissatisfaction with the Trump administration and a possible hint that the GOP would lose its majority in the House in November’s midterm elections. “Make no mistake: Enthusiasm for Democrats is growing everywhere. We’re closing the gap and Republicans are absolutely terrified,” said Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin in a social media post. “Tonight, in the deepest-red congressional district in Georgia — and despite more than $1.5 million in spending by Republicans to defend this Trump +37 seat — Democrat Shawn Harris notched a jaw-dropping more than 20-point over performance in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s backyard,” Democratic Party of Georgia Chair Charlie Bailey added in his own statement.
Fuller, however, pointed to the fact that he still defeated his Democratic opponent by a double-digit margin. “They lost. They’ve got to call me congressman, and they poured in millions of dollars, just lit millions of dollars on fire, and still got crushed,” he said to Fox News. Fuller will defend his seat in this year’s Republican primary in the hopes of advancing to the midterms and winning a full two-year congressional term. Harris has announced that he intends to once again challenge the Republican candidate.
LifeNews Note: S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washigton Stand.
