Clay Fuller, a former Republican prosecutor, and Shawn Harris, a Democrat and retired army general, will head to a run-off after they came out ahead in a special election Tuesday to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in Congress.
The election for the Georgia’s 14th congressional district has been seen as a test of Donald Trump’s sway and may provide a rare opportunity for Democrats in a deep-red pocket of north-west Georgia.
Fuller has Trump’s endorsement and had raised more than $1m leading into voting Tuesday, but Harris, who faced Greene two years ago, has raised more than four times as much. Even though four Republican candidates dropped out before the election, the Republican field was fractured among more than a dozen candidates, including former state senator Colton Moore, a combative agitator to the right of most Republican legislators in Georgia.
Fuller and Harris will face each other again on 7 April, and the winner will complete the rest of Greene’s term through the end of this year with hopes of re-election.
Greene, a firebrand on the right, broke hard against Trump last year after years of loyalty, beginning by questioning his first strike on Iran in June, then by sounding alarms during budget talks that the end of healthcare subsidies would wreck her constituents’ finances. The administration’s resistance on the Epstein files was the last straw. Trump and Greene turned on each other, leading to Greene’s resignation in January to avoid a contentious, divisive primary challenge.
Fuller, a lieutenant colonel in the air national guard, is also a former Trump White House fellow and – by current Republican standards – a mainline conservative and Trump loyalist, which paved the way for Trump’s endorsement.
Harris, a soldier turned cattle rancher, won about 135,000 votes in a losing effort in 2024, a record in Georgia’s 14th district. The Cook Political Report still rates the district as R+19, but Democrats have been over-performing in Republican districts since Trump’s election.
In an interview in December, Harris told the Guardian that the field for Greene’s successor appears open to a Democrat.
“I don’t care who it is, but when we do our analysis – because Marjorie Taylor Greene was so far out there – we don’t see the Republican party, Donald Trump or the local Republican party getting somebody that’s closer to the center,” said Harris. “Because if you get somebody that’s closer to the center, then guess what? You got Shawn Harris.”
Even before war in Iran, Harris said that people in Georgia are more focused on economic issues than foreign wars, and that Congress should be working on getting the cost of groceries to fall.
“The economy is very bad,” Harris said. “People know that things cost more now. People know that. You don’t have to be told, you just know it, you can feel it across the board. Middle-class families are now struggling to pay the light bill, put food on the table, trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their rent or pay their mortgage.”
But on Tuesday, voters had different opinions on what would help them move forward.
Yvonne Otts, 85 and a Dalton native, said “the biggest thing for me is to get somebody with good sense, common sense”. Greene, she said, “put herself first – she didn’t put America first. We’re putting American first for the first time [with Trump].”
“I supported a Republican candidate – the president should have people around him who support him,” Otts said. As for the war in Iran, “That doesn’t affect me at all,” she said. “It’s a very short-term thing.”
But Arthur Carlson, turning 97 next week and a retired Seventh-Day Adventist minister, said Trump “says America First, but he doesn’t act it – and the war in Iran is one example. Ever since he got in, he’s tried to be king.”
Carlson voted for one of the three Democrats in the field of 17 candidates to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene.
