Divided Government Comes to Georgia

Georgia experienced a political earthquake this week. Beware anyone who claims to know what happens next.

Close political observers are unsurprised that Keisha Lance Bottoms won the gubernatorial election, or that Democrats also won the state House. What seemed unfathomable just months earlier was clearly feasible by the closing stretch. Republicans’ keeping the state Senate was the only political “given” entering 2026 that ultimately proved correct.

It was the margins that were shocking. Since July, no poll in the Real Clear Politics average had shown Bottoms with more than a 2-point lead – a far cry from her 8.6-point rout of Republican Rick Jackson. Every other constitutional office followed suit, a clean sweep for Democrats.

Similarly, Democrats were generally thought to be competitive in perhaps 10 House seats, barely enough to erase Republicans’ 99-81 majority. Instead, pending a runoff and potential recounts, Democrats have won a net gain of 12 seats – losing two, but flipping 14 others. They took seats across the northern Atlanta suburbs and in middle Georgia, coastal Georgia and southwest Georgia.

In the state Senate, Republicans barely hung on. Their 33-23 majority was narrowed to 29-27, an even deeper cut than most believed possible. Barring any party-switchers, that will be the highest-ranking body controlled by Republicans in Georgia – just a decade after they boasted 39 senators and 119 representatives.

So for only the second time since 1875, we’ll have divided government at the state level. But the nature of this division makes it truly unprecedented in Georgia history.

The only other time without a governor-House-Senate “trifecta” for one party or the other was 2003-04, in the immediate aftermath of Sonny Perdue’s equally stunning upset of incumbent Gov. Roy Barnes. Perdue, himself a former Democratic senator who switched parties, persuaded four of his former colleagues to follow suit and hand narrow control of the Senate to the GOP, 30-26. But the House remained in Democratic hands, 107-72 (with one independent).

Margins make a mighty difference in legislatures, as the soon-to-be-former speaker of the U.S. House, Mike Johnson, can attest. He spent the past two years managing a one- or two-vote GOP majority. The result was an inability to move much of any legislation if it had no appeal to Democrats; on divisive issues he struggled to keep his caucus united.

Over the next two years, Georgians may see this play out in both the Democratic-held House and the GOP-led Senate. 

Let’s assume Democrats wind up with a 93-87 majority. The presumptive next speaker, Carolyn Hugley, could withstand only one or two defections on tight votes. And like Republican speakers of the past 22 years, she’ll have to thread the needle between her party’s moderates and those on its outer fringe.

Unlike those speakers, she’ll have to do so with the smallest majority in Georgia history. Even when Republicans finally flipped the House in 2004, they had 94 seats to work with. That shot up to 106 after the 2006 election, and remained at or above 100 until dipping to 99 in 2025. Still, a nine-seat majority is workable. Is a three-seat majority? We’re about to find out.

Then there’s the Senate. President Pro Tem Larry Walker and Majority Leader Jason Anavitarte will have zero margin, as losing even one member on a vote would mean a tie. Losing two would mean defeat.

As legislators work this out, how will Bottoms govern? She campaigned on a limited policy platform, and one would expect her to push especially hard for two prominent items: Medicaid expansion and universal pre-K. But Senate Republicans are in position to exact a price for supporting either program, and the budget situation entering January is not conducive to taking on new expenses with annual price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

With the General Assembly so unpredictable, the action may shift to the executive agencies that Bottoms and other newly elected constitutional officers will now control. 

The governor alone appoints scores of people to boards overseeing everything from the Department of Community Health to the Georgia Ports Authority. They can reshape policy in ways that touch Georgians’ everyday lives. How will that play out as positions become open and are filled?

Bonus mystery: Will the Senate take more interest in its prerogative to confirm appointees? Never before in Georgia has that chamber been at partisan odds with the governor.

Narratives build up during and especially after elections. But the story of the next two years is as uncertain as any Georgia has ever seen. The earthquake happened. Now prepare for the aftershocks.