by Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]
November 5, 2026
Tuesday night was a great night for the Republican Party.
I’m dead serious.
The GOP needed to be slapped across the face and told to snap out of it. It needed to be kicked in the butt, and kicked hard. The party that once liked to think of itself as the grownup party needed to be sent to its room without supper and have its car keys and phone taken away.
Well, courtesy of the American voter, that’s what it got.
The breadth and scale of the GOP’s repudiation was as awe-inspiring as it was deserved. Here in Georgia – until recently a deep-red state – it lost the U.S. Senate race by 18 points. Voters who hadn’t elected a Democrat to a constitutional office during a regular election in decades elected 10 of them, from governor through school superintendent and public service commissioner. The margin in some of those races was double digits, and none was smaller than seven points.
Eight of those incoming constitutional officers, including our new governor, will be Black women. Welcome to the new Georgia, y’all.
Democrats who had dared to dream really big, who had dared to believe that maybe they could regain control of the state House of Representatives, appear to have achieved that goal easily. If that chamber flips, they will now have the votes to elect yet another Black woman, Carolyn Hugley, as House speaker.
And while no Democrats had openly dreamed of taking the heavily gerrymandered state Senate, they fell just short of doing that also.
Of course, great, sudden and somewhat unexpected success comes with its problems. In this case, Georgia Democrats have been handed the full burden of governance, and they’re out of practice and don’t have an experienced bench. Some of the people swept into office this week by the blue tsunami are going to have a steep learning curve, and mistakes will be made. To be honest, they were elected not because of who they are, but because of who they are not. They now have a great opportunity to shine on their own merits.
Hire smart, honest people to help you; don’t surround yourself with sycophants and hangers on; rely on the career professionals in state government, most of whom are competent and mission-committed. Be humble in service.
Republicans have an entirely different sort of problem. This is not a “we’ll get ‘em next time” election. The margins are too big to be dismissed so easily, and a look beneath the hood makes it even more troubling.
According to NBC exit polling, Republicans got 14% of the vote from Georgians aged 18-29, and just 26% of the vote among those 44 and younger. That’s the future electorate of Georgia.
Among voters of color, Republicans got 13% of the vote, in a state where white people are already a minority. Among the 71% of Georgia voters who were not white evangelicals, Republicans got 26%. Georgia Republicans have built their party on a narrow base, and structures built on a narrow base have a tendency to topple.
Racial purity, ideological purity, religious purity …. you can’t build a lasting democratic majority around an obsession with purity. The numbers just don’t work.
And then there’s the matter of Donald Trump.
Over the past decade, Republicans in Georgia and other states have built their political identity around Trump, and this week voters across the country made it clear that they repudiate that style of leadership and politics. If GOP strategists try to explain away this week’s catastrophe as something temporary, as a function of gas prices for example, they ensure that their time in the political wilderness will be long.
This didn’t happen because gas is $4 a gallon instead of $3.25 a gallon. It goes much deeper. In service to Trump, Georgia Republicans and their counterparts in Washington have run off most of the competent party leaders who had the intelligence and spine not to kneel to the worst instincts of this president. That will make it difficult to rebuild the party into the conservative counterweight that the state and the country need it to be.
But in the wake of Tuesday’s nightmare, outgoing Gov. Brian Kemp immediately announced that he would not call an emergency legislative session, declining to use the GOP’s last remaining days in power to undermine and sabotage the incoming Democratic administration.
“The voters of our state have spoken,” Kemp said. “As long as I’m governor, we will always respect the results of secure, accessible, and fair elections, and also abide by the laws and constitution of our state.”
That’s how a grownup acts.
Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jill Nolin for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.