The election to pick former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s replacement is headed to a runoff next month after the Donald Trump-backed candidate failed to secure the majority of votes in a crowded race.
Republican Clay Fuller, a district attorney, will face Democrat Shawn Harris, a cattle farmer and retired brigadier general, to fill the vacant seat in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, the Associated Press and other outlets reported.
With 99 percent of the votes counted, according to CNN data, Harris is leading the race with 37.3 percent, while Fuller has 34.9 percent.
Harris, who lost to Greene by 29 points in 2024, has campaigned largely on affordability. Since announcing his campaign last summer, he outraised his closest Republican challenger more than four times over, according to CNN.
Harris, who is married with five sons and four grandchildren, grew up in Blakely, Georgia, in the southwestern part of the state. Having enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school, he saw combat as an infantry commander in Afghanistan, according to his campaign website. He later obtained a degree in Strategic Studies at the Army War College in Pennsylvania.
Trump won the district Harris hopes to represent by 37 points in 2024, indicating that even if Republicans did not have such a crowded primary field, Democrats were still able to dramatically close the gap in the district just outside Atlanta.
The runoff will take place on April 7, and Republicans will be looking to consolidate support in less than a month.
But in the meantime, Republicans in Congress will have to go another month with a razor-thin one-seat majority in the House.
Twenty-two candidates originally filed to run in Georgia’s 14th District before several dropped out, leaving 17 vying for the seat in an extremely crowded race. The final count included 12 Republicans, three Democrats, one Libertarian, and one Independent candidate.
All of the congressional hopefuls, including those who dropped out after qualifying, were on the same ballot, no matter their party affiliation, so the top two were headed to the runoff unless a candidate cleared the majority.
Trump endorsed Fuller, a state district attorney and member of the Air National Guard, in early February in a post on Truth Social, where he called him a “MAGA Warrior.”
But the president appeared to forget less than two weeks later, while talking to reporters about the race on Air Force One, where he bragged about the power of his endorsement in a crowded field and said that he would have to pick someone.
Days later, the president headed down to Rome, Georgia, at the start of early voting, where he pointed to Fuller in the crowd during his speech at an event slated to promote the economy and reiterated he was “endorsing that man very strongly.”
Fuller was one of 12 Republicans running in the race that also included former state Sen. Colton Moore.
Tuesday’s election proved just how much power the president’s endorsement really has as he throws his weight behind a series of GOP candidates ahead of the midterms, including in some GOP contentious primaries.
Greene won the deep red district that includes Rome and Dalton in the northwest corner of the state with more than 64 percent of the vote, but the close MAGA ally announced her January exit from Congress in dramatic fashion as she had an epic falling-out with Trump.
The Georgia Republican clashed with Trump over the release of the Epstein files as the president pushed back on their release last fall.
She then upped her criticism of the president and GOP-led Congress as the clock ticked down on enhanced health-care premiums expiring for millions of Americans at the end of the year and accused Republicans of not having a plan.
The president blasted Greene as disloyal and took to calling her “Marjorie Traitor Greene” in a series of posts and public comments.
Despite her exit from Congress, the former Georgia lawmaker has not let up on her attacks on the Trump administration, including on the president’s decision to launch the U.S. into a war with Iran.
“We said ‘No More Foreign Wars, No More Regime Change!’ We said it on rally stage after rally stage, speech after speech. Trump, Vance, basically the entire admin campaigned on it and promised to put America FIRST and Make America Great Again,” she wrote after the initial strike on Iran on February 28.
“It’s always a lie and it’s always America Last. But it feels like the worst betrayal this time because it comes from the very man and the admin who we all believed was different and said no more,” she added.
Greene has continued to blast the president in a series of posts as the war rages: “Trump doesn’t even know what MAGA is anymore and turned it into MIGA. Trump is not America First, he’s donor first.”
