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Today’s newsletter highlights:

Republicans boast about education spending.
Cobb County legislative delegation fights over appointments.
Former ambassador warns about a rise in discrimination.

Endorsement watch

State Sen. Jason Esteves will face former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and others in the Democratic primary for governor next year.

If he wins the governor’s race next year, state Sen. Jason Esteves wouldn’t just become Georgia’s first Black governor. He’d be the first Latino governor, too.

His campaign is getting help from a national Latino group as he battles former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and others in Georgia’s Democratic primary.

The Latino Victory Fund, an offshoot of the progressive organization founded by actress Eva Longoria and activist Henry R. Munoz III, officially backed Esteves this morning.

The endorsement comes with political help, including a pledge to “fill the gaps” with resources such as consultants and contractors to assist campaign operations.

“Georgia is seen as a major political prize,” Latino Victory President Katharine Pichardo said, referencing the state’s changing demographics and razor thin margins in presidential elections. “He would be certainly one of our most high-profile Latino executives in the country, so we are going to be investing a lot in helping him succeed.”

Esteves was 2-years-old when his family moved from Puerto Rico to Georgia. He’s spoken about the confusion growing up in a Latino home with African ancestry. He said it wasn’t until college that he “met people like me, who could be Black and Latino.”

He’s long had a presence in Atlanta’s Black and Hispanic communities, including membership in both the Black and Hispanic caucuses in the state Legislature. And last year, after a comedian at a Donald Trump campaign rally compared Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage,” he wrote an opinion essay for the AJC decrying the remarks “as a Puerto Rican raised in Georgia.”

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Things to know

Thanks for reading Politically Georgia. Remember, you can get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning by signing up here.

Here are four things to know for today:

Former Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan says he’s now a Democrat — a transition he says started well before the 2020 presidential election.
A Fulton County grand jury declined to indict a former Atlanta police officer involved in a 2023 roadside encounter that left a church deacon dead, the AJC’s Shaddi Abusaid and Jozsef Papp report.
The percentage of students chronically absent from Georgia schools fell to its lowest level since before the pandemic, the AJC’s Cassidy Alexander reports.
Gov. Brian Kemp’s backing of Derek Dooley in one of the country’s most competitive U.S. Senate races is another gamble on a handpicked political newcomer, Greg Bluestein writes.

Back to school

A new digital ad touts state Rep. Deborah Silcox, R-Sandy Springs. It is one of multiple ads paid for by an outside political group tied to Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns.

Parents sending their children back to school across Georgia this week are likely to see a slew of new digital ads touting Republican-backed education spending.

Georgia’s Future, the outside political group tied to House Speaker Jon Burns, is spending up to $50,000 on personalized digital ads for every Republican member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

The ads tout recent education spending crafted by the Republican majority, including money for school safety grants, literacy programs and raises for teachers.

It takes 91 seats to control the Georgia House. Republicans have 100 of them after losing a net of two seats in the 2024 elections. Democrats are hoping to flip a few more seats next year, with the goal of controlling the chamber in time for the next round of redistricting.

Republicans are already pushing back, as these latest ads show. One ad shared with us highlighted state Rep. Deborah Silcox, the Sandy Springs Republican who won her north Fulton County district by less than 4 percentage points in 2024.

Payback

State Rep. David Wilkerson, D-Powder Springs, is chair of the Cobb County delegation.

Cobb County Democrats were incensed after the Republican-controlled state Legislature overruled them to redraw the district lines for local offices.

Now, it’s Republicans who are angry after Democrats bypassed them to appoint two new members to the county election board.

Cobb County delegation Chair David Wilkerson, D-Powder Springs, filed the appointments after getting the Democrats in the delegation to sign off on it. The delegation did not hold a public hearing to discuss the appointments, and Republicans said they were caught by surprise.

“When we vote in the Capitol, it’s public. Now you want to make appointments in a backroom deal that no one knew about until after the fact,” said state Rep. Jordan Ridley, R-Woodstock.

Wilkerson said the law doesn’t require the delegation to hold a hearing. He said he offered Republicans a deal, saying he would reconsider the board appointments if they agreed to return the county’s redistricting decisions to a majority of the local delegation.

“They laughed,” Wilkerson said. “At the end of the day, if you continue to change rules on Democrats, you can’t expect them to ask your permission when the voters have said you are now in charge to make decisions. And that’s what we did.”

GOP Ossoff mailers

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., greeted the crowd at his rally in Savannah last month.

We told you last week that One Nation, a super PAC connected to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, plans to spend $5 million on Georgia’s airwaves to hit U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff for his recent vote against Republicans’ $3.4 trillion tax and spending bill.

Now the group is adding mailers to the campaign. Tipsters from across the Atlanta suburbs have sent us three separate mailers they’ve received from One Nation in the last week alone, all echoing the group’s recent TV ad hitting Ossoff for his vote against the bill. “Why did Senator Ossoff vote to make life more expensive?” one mailer asks.

But while Republicans’ are working to tie Ossoff to the issue, he’s aggressively campaigning on the exact same vote, warning his audiences that the GOP tax and spending cut bill will soon lead to nursing home closures, a supersized immigration detention system, drastic cuts to federal research grants and Medicaid cuts for tens of thousands of Georgians.

“What’s happening to our country right now should chill us to the bone,” Ossoff said at a rally in Savannah last month.

It’s still early days in Georgia, but One Nation racked up several wins in the 2024 cycle, spending tens of millions of dollars against incumbent Democratic senators in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, who all lost their races to Republican challengers.

Hate warning

Michele Taylor, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council, spoke to the Atlanta Rotary Club on Monday.

The last U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council warned on Monday of an unprecedented wave of discrimination “because we have made it socially acceptable to hate.”

Michèle Taylor was appointed by former President Joe Biden after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the council during his first term, citing what he said was the body’s bias against Israel. Trump again withdrew the U.S. from the council at the start of his second term.

On Monday, Taylor — who lives in Atlanta’s Ansley Park neighborhood — told the Atlanta Rotary Club that “antisemitism at the Human Rights Council is very real.” But she argued that “U.S. engagement really matters” at the 47-member body.

As the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Taylor urged Atlanta’s civic and business leaders to not become desensitized to hate — a message she said included herself.

“In my Jewish community, we’re really susceptible to people who are expressing pro-Palestinian views, for example, on college campuses. And they think it is OK to suppress their freedom of speech,” she said. “So, I challenge all of us to not be susceptible.”

It’s official

Former Georgia U.S. Sen. David Perdue is now the Trump administration's ambassador to China.

David Perdue, the former Georgia U.S. senator and newly approved U.S. ambassador to China, has been formally accepted for his job by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In a post on social media, Perdue reported that he recently presented his diplomatic credentials to the Chinese leader, a ceremonial final step to becoming America’s top envoy to the Asian nation.

“I am proud to represent President Trump and the American people as U.S. Ambassador, and I am focused on implementing President Trump’s foreign policy in China,” Perdue wrote.

City Hall

Thomas Worthy is a familiar face in the Georgia Capitol and a power broker in the state’s health care circles. Now he’s aiming for an open Atlanta City Council seat.

Worthy announced this week he’s seeking the District 7 post held by retiring Council member Howard Shook.

Worthy is the chief public policy officer at Piedmont Healthcare and a former chairman of the MARTA board. He was deputy executive counsel in former Gov. Nathan Deal’s administration.

Listen up

Today on the “Politically Georgia” podcast Patricia Murphy and Tia Mitchell discuss Derek Dooley’s official entry to the GOP primary for a U.S. Senate seat. Then Greg Bluestein talks to the AJC’s Tamar Hallerman about the newest season of the AJC’s award-winning podcast series, “Breakdown.”

You can listen and subscribe to the show for free at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have a question or comment for the show? Email us at politicallygeorgia@ajc.com or give us a call at 770-810-5297 and you could be featured on a future episode.

Trump today

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order creating a task force to oversee the 2028 summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Shoutouts

State Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton, first took office in 2021.

Today’s birthdays:

State Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton.
Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera.

Want a birthday shoutout in the Politically Georgia newsletter? There’s a form for that. Click here to submit the shoutouts. It’s not just birthdays. We’re also interested in new jobs, engagements, birth announcements, etc.