Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for May 22, 2026

The War of the Roses began on May 22, 1455 at St. Albans, northwest of London.

In the opening battle of England’s War of the Roses, the Yorkists defeat King Henry VI’s Lancastrian forces at St. Albans, 20 miles northwest of London. Many Lancastrian nobles perished, including Edmund Beaufort, the duke of Somerset, and the king was forced to submit to the rule of his cousin, Richard of York. The dynastic struggle between the House of York, whose badge was a white rose, and the House of Lancaster, later associated with a red rose, would stretch on for 30 years.

John Hancock was elected President of the Second Continental Congress on May 24, 1775.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 convened at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787.

With George Washington presiding, the Constitutional Convention formally convenes on this day in 1787. The convention faced a daunting task: the peaceful overthrow of the new American government as it had been defined by the Article of Confederation.

The process began with the proposal of James Madison’s Virginia Plan. Madison had dedicated the winter of 1787 to the study of confederacies throughout history and arrived in Philadelphia with a wealth of knowledge and an idea for a new American government. It featured a bicameral legislature, with representation in both houses apportioned to states based upon population; this was seen immediately as giving more power to large states, like Virginia. The two houses would in turn elect the executive and the judiciary and would possess veto power over the state legislatures.

William Patterson soon countered with a plan more attractive to the new nation’s smaller states. It too bore the imprint of America’s British experience. Under the New Jersey Plan, as it became known, each state would have a single vote in Congress as it had been under the Articles of Confederation, to even out power between large and small states.

Alexander Hamilton then put forward to the delegates a third plan, a perfect copy of the British Constitution including an upper house and legislature that would serve on good behavior.

Confronted by three counter-revolutionary options, the representatives of Connecticut finally came up with a workable compromise: a government with an upper house made up of equal numbers of delegates from each state and a lower house with proportional representation based upon population. This idea formed the basis of the new U.S. Constitution, which became the law of the land in 1789.

First Lady Martha Dandridge Custis Washington died on May 22, 1802.

On May 22, 1819, the steamship Savannah left the port of Savannah for Liverpool, England. After 29 days, it became the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. On May 22, 1944, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the voyage of the Savannah.

On May 22, 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with his cane. Brooks used the cane as the result of injury sustained in a previous duel, and found Sumner at his desk in the Senate Chamber. In the course of a two-day Senate speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would have nullified the Missouri Compromise on the expansion of slavery, Sumner had criticized three legislators, including a cousin of Rep. Brooks, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina.

The Battle of New Hope Church was fought near Dallas, Georgia May 25-26, 1864 between Confederates under General Joseph E. Johnston and Federal troops under General William T. Sherman.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened May 24, 1883.

On May 25, 1907, an equine statue of John B. Gordon was unveiled on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol.

On May 22, 1932, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the commencement address for Oglethorpe University at the Fox Theater in Atlanta.

Serial bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death near Sailes, Louisiana by a group of LA and Texas state police on May 23, 1934.

On May 23, 1954, the NAACP petitioned the Fulton County Board of Education to desegregate after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Then-Lt. Governor Marvin Griffin announced his candidacy for Governor on May 24, 1954.

The United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia held on May 25, 1962 that the Georgia General Assembly was malapportioned and ordered the reapportionment of the State House and Senate.

Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter won the Virginia Caucus on May 23, 1976, gaining 24 delegates. On May 25, 1976, Carter won the Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky Primary Elections for President.

Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977.

On May 23, 1990, the NFL announced that Atlanta would host the 1994 Super Bowl.

John Smoltz tied the record for most strikeouts by a Braves pitcher, throwing 15 Ks against Montreal Expos on May 24, 1992.

On this day in 1992, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion by Georgia-based The Black Crowes reached number one on the Billboard US Album chart.

Happy Birthday to Bob Dylan, who was born on May 24, 1941.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

This will be a short stack today as I’m starting the weekend.

While Georgia voters turned back an attempt to bring partisan politics to two Supreme Court races, there’s another set of judicial elections that may illustrate the attempted weaponization of the judiciary. From the AJC:

Two highly regarded Fulton County judges with a combined 30 years in their roles have been ousted in Tuesday’s nonpartisan judicial election by prosecutors in the office of District Attorney Fani Willis.

Superior Court Judges Paige Reese Whitaker and Craig Schwall will be replaced by prosecutors Nikia Smith Sellers and Janice Moore at the end of the year.

Whitaker, a judge since 2017, was narrowly defeated by Sellers, who got 50.8% of the vote, according to unofficial results published by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

Schwall, on Fulton’s top bench since 2005, suffered a heavier loss to Moore, who secured 60% of the vote.

Seasoned criminal defense attorney Don Samuel said it is unusual but not unheard of for a sitting judge to be ousted at the polls, though “two in one election is most unusual.”

“Judge Whitaker and Judge Schwall are supremely qualified judges,” he said. “I do not know either of the new judges but hope they will pursue justice fairly and impartially, as their predecessors did.”

Attorney Chuck Boring, a former prosecutor in Fulton and Cobb counties and the past director of the Georgia Judicial Qualifications Commission, said many prosecutors end up on the bench, but you don’t often see multiple prosecutors challenging incumbent judges at the same time.

“Not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but it is unusual, absolutely,” he said. “Especially when you’ve got these two particular judges. Among the Fulton bench, they are elite.”

Moore, who leads the crimes-against-children unit in Willis’ office, said she was surprised to learn in March that two of her colleagues were also challenging incumbent judges.

In addition to Sellers and Moore, Fulton County prosecutor Will Wooten ran unsuccessfully against Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Trenton Brown. Wooten, who helped Willis prosecute President Donald Trump and his allies in relation to the 2020 presidential election, lost 63% of the vote to Brown, who had authored an opinion that ended Willis’ involvement in the Trump case in 2024 and set it on a path to dismissal before trial.

Willis previously denied allegations that she encouraged her staff to challenge judges who had irked her, calling the accusations baseless.

Schwall and Whitaker were the only judges on their court challenged in this year’s election. Judges Alice Benton, Chuck Eaton, Kelly Lee Ellerbe, Kevin Farmer and Robert McBurney were each unopposed and elected to another four-year term.

McBurney, a Fulton County judge since 2012, said Willis’ active campaigning to unseat two of his colleagues “was indeed novel” but in no way prohibited.

“This election was very unusual on the judicial front, from the top of the ticket to the bottom,” he said, referencing the Fulton County races and the “markedly partisan” $8 million failed attempt to get attorneys Jen Jordan and Miracle Rankin to unseat two Georgia Supreme Court justices.

“It was definitely a good election cycle to be running unopposed,” McBurney added.

It’s not unusual for current or former prosecutors to run for judgeships, but this must be seen in the context of the Trump cases brought by Willis and the ongoing efforts in the State Senate to call her to account.

Former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Bordeaux (D-Gwinnett) has a strong analysis of former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’s outright win for the Democratic nomination for Governor. Via the AJC:

My takeaway from election night: never underestimate Keisha Lance Bottoms. I started this column with a more conventional assessment that the Democratic primary electorate is 60% female, over half Black – and votes accordingly.

But then I saw The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s map of the City of Atlanta precincts that Bottoms won compared to second-place finisher Jason Esteves. What is interesting is how similar this map was to the time when she won the Atlanta mayor’s race in 2017 – yet another instance where she was discounted and underestimated.

Both times, Bottoms swept the south Atlanta precincts, the gritty neighborhoods of Black working-class families who face a hardness to life that is quite alien to the middle and upper middle-class families east and north of the city – and by extension in the swing voters of the northern suburbs.

The heuristics are extremely predictable in a Democratic primary:

• all things equal, a female candidate will beat a male candidate,
• a candidate that can signal that he or she is Black is more likely to beat a candidate who is white, and
• voters also usually favor the candidate with the “I” (for incumbent) next to their name.

I have now seen this pattern so many times in Georgia over the past decade that I can almost go down the ballot and tell you exactly who will win each election.

If you look down the election night results for the Democratic primary, with a few interesting exceptions, you will generally see the pattern: female over male, Black over non-Black (to the extent that voters can discern this difference) and incumbent over non-incumbent.

My first-glance assessment of the Democratic governor’s primary is not that Keisha Lance Bottoms ran a particularly strong campaign, but that her male rivals – Jason Esteves, Michael Thurmond, and Geoff Duncan simply didn’t put up campaigns of sufficient strength and skill to overcome the natural tendency of the Democratic electorate.

Candidates frequently underestimate what is required to run a strong statewide campaign that gets a campaign message in front of voters.

I think KLB can win the governor’s race in November, but here’s one problem she’ll have to address. According to the Secretary of State’s website, she took 56.22% of the vote on Tuesday night, but only 42.71% in DeKalb and 48.47% in Fulton. That’s two large troves of voters who know her best from her time in office and she ran between 7.5 and 13 points below her statewide share.