As I m writing you now, books are being written about the magical political calculus which turned the Red State of Georgia . Blue. And while I congratulate President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Senators Ossoff and Warnock . before you all call the painters, let me share with you a story that almost no one is writing about, but that is also worth hearing . I ll call it the Bubba Factor.
I first met Lauren Bubba McDonald in the mid-1980s. I was a young staffer in the Secretary of State s Office, McDonald was the powerful and highly regarded chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and a favorite of legendary House Speaker and Democrat Thomas B. Murphy of Bremen. Speaker Murphy had been instrumental in the election and two terms of outgoing Gov. Joe Frank Harris and during the election season of 1990, Murphy placed his chips and his influence behind Bubba McDonald running for governor.
Meet the only Republican to win Georgia s January 5th runoff
Lauren Bubba McDonald was the only Republican on the Jan. 5 ticket to win a race.
ATLANTA - Lauren Bubba McDonald was sworn in Wednesday for another term on Georgia’s Public Service Commission, taking the oath in the Jackson County Courthouse – a full circle moment because it’s where he assumed the title of county commissioner in 1968.
The staunch supporter of nuclear and solar energy defeated his Democratic challenger Daniel Blackman by 0.76%, making him the only Republican on the Jan. 5 ticket to win a race.
The outcome left even the victor himself puzzled.
Primary Content
Caption Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock rally with President-elect Joe Biden in Atlanta ahead of their election to the U.S. Senate. Credit: Stephen Fowler | GPB News
Democratic U.S. senators-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock could be sworn into office as early as Wednesday, now that the Georgia Secretary of State s office has certified all 159 counties results from the Jan. 5 runoff election.
Fulton County s elections board met Tuesday morning to recertify its results after discovering that memory cards with several hundred votes from a pair of precincts in Milton were not included in the tabulated results, but all of the images of each ballot that was scanned were there.
Charlie Harper
This is an op-ed by Charlie Harper, publisher of GeorgiaPol.com and executive director of PolicyBEST.
The first week of January was a long year in Georgia politics. The most expensive U.S. Senate elections in history flipped two seats and control of the entire Senate. A protest over the result of November’s elections became an occupation of the nation’s Capitol building.
Along the way many of Georgia’s elected officials and elections staff became part of intra-party skirmishes that are part loyalty tests to President Trump, part blame-game, and entirely unseemly. As is the nature of politics, much of it was completely shocking while totally expected in the aftermath of such abject failures.
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