Insider
Georgia is holding congressional and state legislative primaries on Tuesday. Polls officially closed at 7 p.m. ET.
The races and the stakes:
The most prominent congressional race of the night is a Democratic member-on-member primary between Reps. Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux in the metro Atlanta area.
Both McBath and Bourdeaux flipped control of previously-GOP held districts in the past two election cycles. Bourdeaux made her mark as the only Democrat to flip a competitive, Republican-controlled seat in the 2020 election while Democrats lost a dozen House seats on net nationwide.
In response, Georgia Republicans eliminated both their competitive seats in post-2020 congressional redistricting.
Republicans redrew the 6th District to include more safely-Republican exurbs highly unlikely to elect a Democrat and made the new 7th District into an overwhelmingly Democratic seat based in blue-trending Gwinnett County.
Bourdeaux represents 57% of the new district's population while McBath only represents 12% of the new seat, according to FiveThirtyEight, but neither currently reside in the district.
State Rep. Donna McLeod is also running for the district against McBath and Bourdeaux — and is the only candidate out of three who lives within the new district's boundaries. Federal law doesn't require members of Congress to live within the districts they represent, but McLeod has emphasized her ties to the newly-drawn seat in primary debates, the 19th* News reported.
Both McBath and Bourdeaux share largely similar policy positions and voting records, but McBath is benefiting from significantly more outside spending on her behalf, according to OpenSecrets.
Groups including Black PAC, the Black Progressive Action Coalition, Everytown for Gun Safety Victory Fund, and Protect our Future, a PAC funded by a prominent cryptocurrency billionaire, have spent over $4 million supporting McBath, while the Democrats Serve PAC has spent a much smaller sum of $20,000 opposing her.
Billionaire and 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg also resumed his big political spending habits after a hiatus. In a bid to influence this race, his PAC dropped a last-minute $1 million into ads supporting McBath, Politico reported.
Democratic members drawn into the same district are also set to face off in member-on-member primaries in Michigan, Illinois, and New York later this year.
Meanwhile, in Northwest Georgia, controversial GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was elected in 2020, is facing multiple Republican primary challengers after a judge ruled against groups seeking to remove Greene from the ballot.
Greene was removed from her committee assignments in 2021 over a series of inflammatory, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic tweets and was permanently suspended from Twitter in 2022. More recently, she's come under scrutiny for an outburst at President Joe Biden's state of the union address and for also speaking at a white-nationalist conference headlined by Nick Fuentes, whom the Anti-Defamation League has described as a "well-known white supremacist pundit and organizer."
Greene, a prolific small-dollar fundraiser, has raised $9.2 million and spent $6.3 million so far this cycle, dwarfing the roughly $230,000 spent by her main Republican rival Jennifer Strahan.
The Democrats seeking to run against her in the deep-red district include Marcus Flowers, Holly McCormack, and Wendy Davis.
A crowded Republican primary is also taking place in the safely-Republican 10th Congressional District vacated by Rep. Jody Hice, who is running for secretary of state.
If no candidate wins over 50% of the vote in Georgia's primaries on Tuesday, the top two candidates will head to a June 21 runoff election.
Follow Insider's live coverage of all of Tuesday night's primaries here.
Georgia state legislative primaries:
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