'MAGA lost its luster': MTG’s old seat may flip as Trump and GOP 'made a lot of enemies'
When Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from Congress in January, as many as 22 candidates lined up to vie for her U.S. House seat in Georgia’s 14th District.
The vast majority were Republican. As of Monday, 12 remained in the March 10 special election race, giving Democrats hope that a split Republican vote might mean the seat can actually be flipped — despite its solid red rating and Greene’s definitive victories since 2020, when the high-profile, hard-right, conspiracy-theory-espousing politician was first elected.
Raw Story spoke with the three Democrats competing for the seat. With poor Republican polling under President Donald Trump and recent wins for Democrats in other red states, they presented different paths to victory.
Shawn Harris, a retired brigadier general and cattle producer, lost to Greene in 2024 and declared his 2026 candidacy prior to Greene’s surprise resignation announcement in November.
A Democratic win “is 100 percent realistic because this race here is completely switched,” Harris told Raw Story.
“Gotta keep in mind, whoever wins this race has never served in Congress before. Period.
“So now it goes back to people are actually looking at our résumés and looking at our background. They [are] looking at what we did before, and if I put my background up against anybody … people understand that, ‘Hey, this is the right guy.’”
Shawn Harris on his cattle farm in Rockmart, Ga. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)
Democrats have been chipping away at Greene’s domination in GA-14 since 2020, when she won with 75 percent of the vote.
In 2022, after two years of Greene’s far-right antics on Capitol Hill, Democrat Marcus Flowers cut her share of votes by nearly 10 percent, capturing more than 88,000 of his own.
While Greene won about 64 percent of the vote against Harris in 2024, nearly 135,000 voters, a record, picked the Democrat.
“We're taking everything that we learned from the last race and brought it to this race,” Harris said.
“I just want to make sure that everybody in northwest Georgia understands that Shawn Harris is going to go to Washington, D.C., and the people that I'm working for, the hardworking people here in northwest Georgia … I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican, my focus is you.”
Harris is far-and-away the biggest fundraiser in the race, having raised more than $2.2 million through the end of 2025, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.
He has brought in more than $2.4 million in 2026, Renee Schaeffer, his campaign manager, told Raw Story.
The next closest fundraiser is Republican Clay Fuller, endorsed by President Trump, who raised more than $786,000 as of Feb. 18, according to FEC filings.
‘Anything can happen’
Clarence Blalock, a Democratic consultant running for Georgia commissioner of labor, faced Harris in a runoff in the 2024 primary.
Withdrawing his 2026 candidacy, Blalock endorsed Harris.
“Shawn has a chance to clear,” Blalock told Raw Story.
“At some point all that spending matters. He's going to be able to reach more people, reach low propensity voters.
“If he can resonate with some Republicans, or just basically get out every Democrat — because it's a special election, because it's going to be low turnout — if you turn out a higher percentage of your people, you can close that gap.”
Clarence Blalock in front of a restaurant in Rockmart, Ga. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)
That happened in Georgia last year when Democrat Eric Gisler flipped a state House seat in a special election.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) counts Gisler’s victory in a Trump 12-point advantage seat as one of its biggest wins among the 26 seats the party has flipped since Trump’s re-election, said Sam Paisley, a spokesperson for the DLCC.
In Texas in February, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a Republican state Senate district that favored Trump by 17 points — the DLCC’s first flip of 2026, a startling success that made national headlines.
“There actually probably are enough votes to win in these types of things, and in these specials, there's always a high level of chaoticness where anything can happen, too,” Blalock said.
In another state-level race, Blalock worked with Peter Hubbard, one of two Democrats to upset incumbent Republicans to win seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, the first non-federal statewide wins for Democrats in Georgia in 19 years.
Even Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) celebrated the victories, calling them “a rejection of Trump-era policies.”
Towards the end of her time in Congress, Greene did the same — turning particularly fiercely against Trump over his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Now, Democrats in GA-14 are hopeful that frustration with Trump and his party, particularly around hardline federal immigration enforcement and the Epstein files, will result in more switched votes.
“MAGA’s lost a lot of luster,” Blalock said.
“Who wants to be associated with pedophilia? I don't. I just think people are getting tired of it.”
Harris said 5 percent of GA-14 voters who backed Trump in 2024 also voted for him.
He is distributing “Republicans for Shawn” signs and said he expects many more to back him this time.
“We're very confident that we're going to be able to get our Democrats out, the independents out and those Republicans that feel that the Republican Party has left them,” Harris said.
“They [are] still Republicans, but the current Republican Party has left them with MAGA, and they're going to come out and vote for me.”
‘Times change’
Harris said he has resonated with some conservatives who consider themselves Ronald Reagan or Bush-era Republicans, focused on the economy.
Another Democratic candidate, patent lawyer Jonathan Hobbs, said the working-class district leaned Democratic in the 1970s and 1980s, so voters fed up with the GOP could flip back.
Jonathan Hobbs (provided photo)
“History tells us the future,” Hobbs said.
“Times change, and Trump [and] Republicans have made a lot of enemies … Everything changes, and especially with the handling of the immigration issue, where people are getting shot, that's not good. This is totally mishandled.”
Jim Davis, an author and political scientist who worked on Ross Perot’s independent 1992 presidential campaign, is also running as a Democrat — and is less confident of success.
Jim Davis (provided photo)
He created a computer model that showed a path to victory if only two Democrats were in the race and Republicans split their votes.
But Davis said Democrats were “very, very unfriendly toward my candidacy,” and with three candidates, “I don't think there's as much hope for any of us as there once was.”
While all three Democrats agreed affordability is one of the largest issues in GA-14, Davis said Democrats have lacked “winning issues” and clear messaging about “What do you stand for?”
“Welfare is very hard for people to accept down here in our district, because their backs are already to the wall,” he said. “They feel like they don't want to contribute to anybody else.
“They're hard people because they've had a hard time, and until Democrats get something in front of that, they're not going anywhere. They've lost all the people. They've lost their voting base.”
To win, Democrats need to demonstrate their stances in a concrete way, such as proposing subsidized daycare, Davis said.
“You've got to do something to break out,” he said.
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