Conservative Justices Sarah Warren and Charlie Bethel will keep their seats on the Georgia Supreme Court, CNN's Decision Desk projected Tuesday, a clean win for incumbents and a sharp rebuke to a well-funded liberal campaign that tried to crack the court's 8-1 conservative majority.
Warren, the presiding justice, defeated former Democratic state senator Jen Jordan. Bethel, the other incumbent, turned back personal injury attorney Miracle Rankin. No incumbent justice on the Georgia Supreme Court had lost reelection in over a century heading into the contest, and that streak remains intact.
The results matter beyond Georgia's borders. Democrats had openly framed the two races as a beachhead, a chance to flip seats now and set up a possible ideological takeover of the court when three more GOP-appointed justices face reelection in 2028. That plan ran into a wall on Tuesday.
The Georgia contests drew more than $4 million in advertising, CNN reported, split roughly evenly between support for the incumbents and support for the challengers. Former President Barack Obama personally endorsed both Jordan and Rankin, an unusual move in what Georgia law treats as nonpartisan judicial elections.
Jordan described learning about the Obama endorsement through social media:
"You get a little notification in your Instagram. I checked it, and I'm like, 'Why in the world is the former president mentioning me?'"
She added that she had "no clue that it was coming" and called the race "a heavy lift."
Heavy lift is right. Obama's star power was not enough to overcome the structural advantage incumbents hold in Georgia judicial races, or the resources marshaled on the other side. Gov. Brian Kemp's leadership PAC dropped $500,000 into the contest. Republican governors appointed eight of the nine sitting justices on the court, a fact that gave Democrats both a target and a steep climb.
The two-term GOP governor framed the Democratic effort as an outside-money intrusion into a system designed to be above partisan warfare. At a campaign stop alongside U.S. Senate candidate Derek Dooley, Kemp made the case plainly:
"It's unfortunate the other side backed by money that's from outside the state is trying to make a nonpartisan race political. That's not how our judiciary works in our state. And I would urge people to vote for the incumbents. They have bipartisan support from people who really understand how important it is to have a nonpartisan judiciary."
Heath Garrett, an adviser for Warren, struck a similar note.
"There is a partisan attack on our nonpartisan Georgia Supreme Court. Justice Warren enjoys widespread support from Democrats and Republicans alike because she's committed to fairness and impartiality, not politics."
That framing, nonpartisan court under partisan siege, proved effective. Voters in Georgia had the chance to inject ideology into the judiciary and declined.
State Democratic Party chair Charlie Bailey acknowledged the party was testing new ground. "This is the first time we've gone on offense, and we have raised a bit of money for it," Bailey said. He pointed to the party's success last fall in defeating two incumbents on the state's Public Service Commission as evidence that entrenched seats could be flipped.
But a utility regulatory body and the state's highest court are different arenas. The Georgia Supreme Court has handled some of the most consequential legal questions in recent state history, including rulings on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and the scope of state voting laws. The stakes were obvious to both sides, and so was the incumbents' advantage.
Rankin, the challenger to Bethel, tried to tie her candidacy to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which she argued made state courts more important than ever.
"I believe Callais is a powerful reminder that state courts matter. So, when the US Supreme Court changes the federal legal landscape, more questions about voting rights, fair representation, election rules and constitutional protections will be heard and dealt with in our state court."
It was a reasonable legal argument. It was not a winning political argument, at least not this cycle.
Georgia's races arrived against a backdrop of escalating spending on state supreme court elections nationwide. Races in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin drew tens of millions of dollars in recent cycles. Democratic-backed candidates won Wisconsin's high court seat earlier this year and took a Pennsylvania seat last November. Those victories emboldened the left's judicial strategy.
But Georgia is not Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. The Peach State's conservative judicial bench is deeper, its incumbents better funded, and its electorate, even in a contested cycle, less receptive to explicit efforts to reshape the courts along ideological lines.
The Wisconsin contest, by contrast, featured campaign trail appearances by Elon Musk and became a proxy fight over national politics. Georgia's races generated heat but not the same level of outside spectacle.
The 2028 cycle looms. Three more GOP-appointed justices on the Georgia Supreme Court will face voters that year. Democrats will almost certainly try again, armed with whatever lessons they extract from Tuesday's losses. Kemp, meanwhile, has already called Georgia lawmakers to a special session to consider redrawing U.S. House maps ahead of 2028, a sign that the broader political chessboard in the state remains active.
For now, the court's composition holds. Eight of nine seats remain in the hands of justices appointed by Republican governors. The liberal minority stays at one.
The Democratic strategy depended on convincing Georgia voters that a nonpartisan judicial election was really a partisan one, and that they should vote accordingly. Voters heard the pitch, saw the Obama endorsement, watched the millions pour in, and said no.
Sometimes the best thing an electorate can do is refuse to fix what isn't broken.
