March 10 (Reuters) – The election in Georgia to choose the successor to Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene in the U.S. House of Representatives will go to a runoff next month after no candidate, including one backed by President Donald Trump, received a majority of the votes, AP News and NBC News projected on Tuesday.
Trump’s preferred candidate, former district attorney for four northwest Georgia counties Clay Fuller, faced fellow Republican Colton Moore, a hard-right former state senator and Shawn Harris, a moderate Democrat who sought to court disillusioned Trump voters, were seen as the top contenders in a field of 17 candidates.
The race has drawn outsized national attention following former U.S. Representative Greene’s abrupt departure in January after an acrimonious split with Trump, setting off a high-stakes contest over who should succeed one of the Make America Great Again movement’s most visible figures in Congress.
Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, a mostly blue-collar corridor from Atlanta’s exurbs up to the Tennessee border, vaulted into the national spotlight after Greene swept to victory there in 2020, turning a reliably Republican seat into a closely watched barometer of the party’s populist wing.
The contest is now being viewed as a test of Trump’s grip on his base ahead of the November general election. Fuller’s failure to secure an outright majority could signal some softening of that hold.
The winner of the special election will serve through the end of 2026 but must immediately campaign for the full two-year term starting January 2027, beginning with a May primary that could pit many of the same contenders against each other again.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Alistair Bell)
