Republican Tim Fleming will face Democrat Penny Brown Reynolds in the race to replace Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The pair won their respective parties’ primary runoff elections on Tuesday by wide margins.
Before being elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2022, Fleming worked closely with Gov. Brian Kemp, serving as his deputy secretary of state and his chief of staff when Kemp was first elected governor in 2018.
Fleming took on former DeKalb CEO Vernon Jones in the Republican runoff, where the two largely battled over who was more of a Trump conservative.
“I’ve voted for Donald Trump six times,” said Fleming at the Atlanta Press Club Debates in May. “I’ve always been there for Donald Trump. I campaigned with him…for him in 2024.”
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Jones is a former Democrat-now-Republican, who campaigned alleging voter fraud in the state and said he would reform the voting system.
Fleming has called into question Georgia’s elections but not with the same vigor. He has said he believes there were irregularities in 2020 and on his campaign’s website writes that he wants to make it “impossible for the left to cheat in our elections.”
Fleming is also calling for changing to absentee voting, alleging mail-in ballots are used for fraud.
“The only way you get an absentee ballot is if you’re elderly, you’re disabled, or [you are a] military service member serving our country overseas. Other than that, you have plenty of opportunities to go vote, whether that’s your early voting or on election day voting in person.”
Fleming also campaigned on reducing regulations for businesses, saying he will cut red tape that is holding businesses back. This is also lockstep with the Trump administration that has push deregulation across scores of industries. Critics say widespread deregulation leads to potential negative impacts on the environment, worker safety and overall public health.
Brown Reynolds defeats Barrett
With the Republicans focused on election integrity, Democrats were largely forced to campaign on protecting Georgia’s voting system from President Trump and his supporters.
“Republicans poisoned the well,” said Brown Reynolds, a former Fulton County judge, at the Atlanta Press Club debates in May. “What the secretary of state’s office has to do is make people feel confident in their elections.”
Brown Reynolds beat Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett.
Brown Reynolds said the office has to be transparent and accountable. And she says she is ready to go to court to fight those trying to thwart democracy.
“I ran a civil rights division for the president of the United States, and I served as the top lawyer for a governor,” said Brown Reynolds. “I am the lawyer who understands the law and what it will take to fight anybody.”
Brown Reynolds also says when it comes to handling other sectors of the office like businesses and licensing, training will be vital.
“And so what I want to be able to do is have a division in that office that a part of the job is you go in and you get your business [license], but then we will go all around the state and we will help people with seminars and training. And we will help them to be able to get business plans.”
Brown Reynolds says she’ll issue a “report card” on progress and hold people accountable.
Barrett criticized the former judge for leaving the bench two years before her term was up to pursue a career as a reality court judge on television.
What does the Georgia secretary of state do?
Georgia’s secretary of state race will be another statewide race testing the influence of President Donald Trump.
The office handles multiple issues in Georgia, including financial regulatory filings, business licenses and regulations, but since 2020, the public and political focus has largely been on the running of Georgia’s elections and unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in Georgia in 2020, when he lost to President Joe Biden, has even pitted Republicans against themselves and put the secretary of state’s office in the crosshairs with the Trump wing of the GOP.
Trump made a series of allegations in public and on a January 2021 phone call with Raffensberger, which among others included that thousands of dead people had voted.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said.
“Mr. President, the challenge that you have is that the data you have is wrong,” Raffensperger told Trump in the hour long call.
Raffensperger would fail in his bid for governor in 2026. The top two Republicans include Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who was part of an alternate elector scheme to overturn Biden’s win in the state, and Rick Jackson, a billionaire businessman who has run a very pro-Trump campaign.
Meanwhile, Raffensperger’s deputy at the time, Gabriel Sterling, who regularly shot down conspiracy theories over the 2020 election, finished fourth in the Republican primary this year to succeed his former boss.
