Category: Tom Baxter

Georgia’s state economist, Jeffrey Dorfman, capped off his annual presentation to the House-Senate Budget Committee last week with a brief discussion of a looming revenue challenge to the state. For longtime Metro Atlanta residents, it may come as a shock.

The Georgia General Assembly has begun this year’s session on a positive and generally bipartisan note, with a lot of new and optimistic members and plenty of money to give away. We don’t have to look very far to see that we’re lucky.

Last week we got to see the U.S. House of Representatives not as two warring factions of idealists — which is the way they pitch themselves to the suckers they raise money from online — but as one enormous, dysfunctional family stuck in the same room together. They could have been waiting for a will to be read, but in this case, they were waiting for a speaker to be elected.

At the beginning of 2023, Georgia stands at the center of the football, political and cultural universes. If you want to argue with that, go find any Bulldogs fan, or Rachel Maddow.

You better watch out. That’s the holiday greeting a Louisiana utility lobbyist might be sending his colleagues in other states this year.

he long Senate race has descended into the season of postmortems, when the losers point fingers and the winners check what’s left in the campaign account. But, dear reader, we don’t have to do either.

ate Tuesday, as the mist and fog began to clear over much of Georgia, you could begin to make out the features of a new American political landscape. The mountain called Donald Trump is still out there, but it doesn’t stand out nearly as prominently, as other peaks come into view.

While we wait for the results to come in, let’s cheer the long-suffering poll workers who made this election possible and pat ourselves on the back one more time for standing in line to vote. Then let’s get real about it.

When inboxes start filling up with desperate messages from Democratic fundraisers, one thing’s for certain.

You wouldn’t exactly say this has been an issues-driven Senate race, but largely because Republican challenger Herschel Walker brings the subject up so frequently, energy and climate issues have been central to this campaign.

Rep. David Ralston’s announcement that he was stepping down as House speaker was overshadowed by Election Day four days later, which is probably what Ralston intended.

We need some new terminology, maybe even another tense, for that floating time between the beginning of early voting and Election Day.

How do we account for the surge in early voting, which is running close to the early turnout in Georgia’s presidential election of 2020 and nearly 60 percent higher than the 2018 turnout? It’s a combination of things, including fear.

Before we get into where Herschel Walker’s campaign stands this week, we should pause for a moment to reflect on why it took so long for it to get there.

President Joe Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, potential rivals in 2024, made nice to each other last week as Hurricane Ian ripped across Florida and into the Carolinas, and by all reports the federal and state partners have worked together smoothly in the aftermath of the storm. But if storms like Ian become more frequent, the politics of catastrophe will become increasingly frayed.

Last week, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced that his office was replacing the election equipment in Coffee County to the tune of around $400,000, an act he said “puts to an end any argument that the results in Coffee County, and anywhere else in Georgia for that matter, will not accurately reflect the will of Georgia voters.” But this story isn’t going away.