The Public Service Commission races in Georgia last week probably had the least to do with Donald Trump directly, and the most to do with the issues that are likely to dominate politics over the next several years, of any statewide elections in the country.
That, in a nutshell, is why the results here had an outsized national significance, in a week when Democrats scored big wins in Virginia, New Jersey, California and elsewhere.
True, Trump will to some extent be on the ballot whenever the candidates have Ds and Rs after their names, but he wasn’t at the front of most voters’ minds last week when they voted decisively for Democratic challengers Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard.
What was on their minds? At the AJC Politically Georgia forum of 2026 gubernatorial candidates last week, several candidates answered in harmony, taking up the word like a Tin Pan Alley song: Affordability.
Affordability. It’s one of those accordion words that can be stretched and squeezed to cover a lot of voter discontents. Sooner or later, however, politicians here and elsewhere will have to say more specifically what they’re talking about, and that’s where the Georgia races are a guidepost.
The affordability issues voters had in mind last week were the six rate increases Georgia Power has been granted by the PSC over the past two years, and the company’s plans, rubber-stamped by the commission, for a dramatic expansion that has nothing to do with the average customer’s needs.
The candidates last week were talking about the problems people are having paying their bills, but this election also points to a related affordability issue: whether the nation can afford the enormous investment in artificial intelligence and data centers, which has compelled utilities like Georgia Power toward unprecedented increases in power production. Drilling down even farther, affordability can be interpreted as a generational issue, in which younger Americans are being disproportionately affected by AI-related layoffs and rising rents.
To be clear, if the Democrats hadn’t won these races, it would have been hard to take them seriously in Georgia for another decade. They had tremendous incentive, not having won a non-federal statewide race since 2006. They had a lot going for them, much more in fact than the local elections in Democratic areas, which Republicans have fixed on as the reason incumbents Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson were defeated. In line with the word of the hour, you might say the Democrats couldn’t afford to lose.
Still, the numbers in this off-year race are striking. DeKalb and Clayton are counties where Democratic presidential candidates can expect to win by margins of two or three to one. Last week the Democratic PSC candidates won both those counties by 10-to-1 margins.
The Republican incumbents won by 10-to-1 margins in Glascock County, but only 420 people voted in Glascock County. More than any election I recall, this one shows the growing cleavage between the two Georgias. If you count only the counties where only a few thousand or even a few hundred people voted last week, the Republicans win both these seats.
But if you raise the count to include edge counties that aren’t declining in population, like Paulding, Douglas or Columbia, the Republicans have already lost. As Greg Bluestein points out in the AJC, Democrats could have won these races even without the huge majorities they put up in the core Metro Atlanta counties.
That speaks to something more powerful than can be explained by outside money, viral videos and local elections, all of which also played some part.
Republican attempts to make a cultural appeal to the MAGA base, with Echols’ reference to Alicia Johnson as a “DEI candidate” and the warning to avoid being like California, fell completely flat. Nor did those Georgia Power ads promoting the base rate freeze have any effect.
It’s hard to say what effect last week’s results might have on next year’s races in Georgia, but there are a lot of races around the country in places where residents have risen up against data centers, seen their utility bills rise, and worried that their jobs might someday become artificial. What happened here could have implications for all of them.
Demographics. But I think most everyone is feeling that pinch, and that pinch also means much of GA (a growth state) makes little sense now as a place to live, which will increasingly show up in the pop/migration numbers.
Any joy I might have felt at the victories by Democrats in Georgia and Mississippi was erased by caving Democratic senators, with no concessions from the GOP or Trump, to end the shutdown. Any new affordability in the realm of electrical bills will be wiped away by the increase in healthcare premiums. If I am wrong, please tell me why.
you are not wrong. we need another way. the democrats are not that way.
I live in Alabama, and just had a long conversation with an Alabama Power employee about future energy demands and what we are doing to meet the needs. He said here we’ve converted most coal powered plants to natural gas, and that is also what new facilities we were building. I asked him about how they were looking at future needs of data centers, and he said it’s mostly banking on more gas fired plants, and really expressed a need for our energy supplies to be more diversified. Asking about nuclear, he said it’s not being considered, even though it would be the best solution. It’s just that nobody is willing to make the long term investment. It seems that our politics and finances are all just looking at the short term, and creating future shortages which will probably raise prices more than if the investment in nuclear would now.