On Wednesday, Republican senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia announced that he will retire from the Senate at the end of 2019 due to the worsening condition of his health (Isakson suffers from Parkinson’s disease). The retirement means that Republican governor Brian Kemp will appoint Isakson’s successor, and a special election will be held on the same day as the November 2020 general election, when incumbent Georgia Republican David Perdue will be defending his own Senate seat.
CNN’s Michael Warren reports that Kemp’s short-list of possible Senate appointees includes “state attorney general Chris Carr, Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Georgia’s current lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan. Carr was chief of staff for Isakson for six years.”
The last Democrat to win a Senate election in Georgia was conservative Zell Miller in 2000, but progressive Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 governor’s race by just 1.4 percentage points. Abrams said on Wednesday that she won’t run for Senate in 2020 but would be “honored” to be vice president.
At FiveThirtyEight, Nathaniel Rakich explains why Georgia could be competitive in 2020:
[T]he steady growth of the state’s nonwhite population and the defection of voters in well-educated suburbs (such as those around Atlanta) to Democrats in the Trump era have caused it to drift left. In the 2008 presidential election, Georgia was 12.5 points redder than the nation as a whole; in 2012, it was 11.8 points redder; in 2016, it was 7.3 points redder. It is reasonable to expect, then, that Georgia could be even closer to the tipping point in 2020. In other words, a good national cycle for Democrats — or a good Democratic candidate — could be enough to flip the seat blue (or at least come close). […]
There’s also one final twist to be aware of — the reason it would behoove each party to rally around a single candidate: Instead of a normal primary followed by a general election, all candidates, regardless of party, will run in a single “jungle primary” on Nov. 3, 2020. So if no candidate receives a majority, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff.3 This makes the race extra unpredictable, as any runoff would occur without the increased turnout of the presidential election influencing the results of the race.