Democrats line up for a race they haven’t proved they can win

When state Rep. Ruwa Romman entered the 2026 Democratic primary field Monday, she became her party’s seventh announced candidate for governor. That says something about the Democrats’ enthusiasm for next year, if not their chances.

The size of the Democratic field is particularly notable when you consider that U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath has already dropped out of a planned race for governor due to family health problems, and at least two big names, two-time party nominee Stacey Abrams and Savannah Mayor Van Johnson, are said to be still considering a run.

The large field may not be as much a measure of Democratic confidence in next year’s general election as it is a sign that the days of holding a place for one candidate or another are over, which is obviously not an encouraging sign for Abrams.

The numbers over the past couple of election cycles tell a perplexing story for Democrats. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of registered voters in the state jumped significantly, from 6.9 million voters in 2018, the year Brian Kemp won his first election battle with Abrams, to 7.8 million in 2022 when he faced her again.

That might have seemed ideal for Abrams, who had based her election strategy on expanding the electorate. But despite the big increase in registration, the number of people who voted in 2022 stayed roughly the same: to be precise, 3,917,299 in 2018, compared to 3,953,408 in 2022. Within that relatively stable voter universe, Kemp increased his 2022 victory margin by more than three percentage points while Abrams lost more than a hundred thousand votes than she had received four years before.

In addition to an increasing population, the big increase in voters between 2018 and 2022 was due to the 2016 automatic voter registration law, which signs up new voters when they apply for or renew their driver’s license. There will almost certainly be an increase in voters next year, but it’s unlikely to be as big as in the previous election.

Since Cobb and Gwinnett counties began voting Democratic in 2016, Georgia counties haven’t shifted in their party leanings. Every county that voted for Kemp in 2018 did so again in 2022, and the same counties voted twice for Abrams.

Again, this might seem to be an encouraging sign for the next Democratic nominee for governor, because so many of the rural counties that voted solidly for Kemp are losing population while Abrams did well in the state’s growth centers. Encouraging enough at least to draw such a sizable field.

If there were a Broad Middle Party here in Georgia, which of course there isn’t, it would be looking forward to an interesting primary. You figure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and maybe the Republican businessman Clark Dean would be in it, along with Michael Thurmond, Geoff Duncan and probably more of the announced Democrats.

Instead, we will likely be arguing after this is over about which moderate took votes away from the moderates in the other party. And in many of these arguments, both sides will be right.

Romman, who the AJC today compared to New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, would definitely not be in the Broad Middle primary. She’s announced a very progressive agenda, including raising the state’s minimum wage and reopening rural hospitals.

Nor would Lt. Gov. Burt Jones have anything to do with a Broad Middle primary. He’s already bagged the endorsement of President Donald Trump, and the centerpiece of his campaign is the elimination of the state income tax.

The difference is that while it’s noteworthy that Romman, the first Palestinian-American to be elected to any office in the state, has entered the race, nobody’s claiming she’s a frontrunner in the Democratic primary. On the other hand, it would be hard to find anyone who doesn’t think Jones is the frontrunner in his race, and hasn’t thought so for a long time.

Moderation may have fallen from favor as a political approach, but the word’s still in the state motto. We’ll see how often it’s mentioned in the Republican primary, which we’ll be looking at soon.