As the 2026 campaign cycle began last year, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff and Democratic Party activists moved to make a major change at the Democratic Party of Georgia.
Without control of the White House or Governor’s Mansion, the state party would play an outsized role in whether Democrats would win or lose in the upcoming elections. But the top job of party chair was only part-time and occupied by U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, who had a demanding schedule in Washington to juggle.
With Ossoff’s crucial reelection on the horizon, Democrats voted to pay for a full-time, dedicated party chair. Two months later, they elected Charlie Bailey for the job with support from Ossoff, U.S. Rep. Lucy McBath, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and others.
Bailey had reached out to Ossoff before the votes were cast. “We talked about what my vision was, what I wanted to do,” Bailey said in an interview this week. “I asked him what he needed.”
Like Bailey, Ossoff’s top focus was grassroots organizing, the kind of door-to-door canvassing that’s expensive but can move the needle in close elections. Bailey also told Ossoff and others that he wanted to re-create the party’s long-gone research operation, double down on recruiting, get involved in targeted races and supercharge fundraising to make it all possible.
Now, 18 months into the job, Bailey has so far exceeded most Democrats’ expectations. The opposition research group he wanted is up and running. The coordinated campaign now has more than 100 staffers with 30 staffed field offices. The door-to-door canvassing that Ossoff wanted has been underway since May.
It’s added up to crucial wins. Last year, Democrats scored 26-point victories in two Public Service Commission races, while State Rep. Eric Gisler, a Democrat, flipped a Republican House seat in the Athens area. Bailey said the party used them all as test runs for 2026.
“When you can get a message that hits the reality of what someone’s going through, and you’ve got a specific action that someone took to bring it about, that’s point A to point B,” he said of Republicans. “Now, C is ‘Fire their..” Well, you get the picture.
That is typical for Bailey, a sharp-talking former prosecutor from rural Harris County. After losing two statewide campaigns, first for attorney general in 2018 and then lieutenant governor in 2022, he had returned to practice law for what he thought would be the long haul until the party chair job came open.
With President Donald Trump back in the White House, Bailey saw Georgia Democrats’ best chance in years to return to power. He jumped back into the fray.
“I think the single biggest factor in 2026 is a slate of Republican candidates that have fully stood by Donald Trump as he has done some of the most unpopular things any president has ever done,” Bailey said. “He said he’s going to help families. He didn’t say that he was going to start with the first family.”
With polls showing Trump’s approval ratings deep in negative territory, Bailey and Democrats have the environment working for them. But they’ll need all the help they can get in a state where Republicans have dominated for decades and when the GOP nominee for governor, Rick Jackson, is a multibillionaire promising to spend “whatever it takes” to win in November.
Jay Walker, a senior adviser to Jackson, told me earlier this summer that the Jackson campaign is modeled on the famous Kemp turnout operation that delivered a seven-point victory to the governor four years ago. Voters will get personalized, “concierge service,” he said, “And we don’t stop until Election Day.”
Bailey dismissed “concierge service” as pure spin.
“That sounds like a slick term someone came up with to paper over the fact that they ain’t really doing much work,” Bailey said. “You can’t replicate presence in a community with a slick, fancy text message that an algorithm told you to spit out.”
If the cable news talking heads are right and Democratic voters want leaders who are willing to fight Republicans, they’re getting their money’s worth in Bailey.
He calls Jackson, “just a guy that ran out of politicians to buy so now he’s going to run for governor.” U.S. Rep. Mike Collins is “an outright bigot and a fool.” And the GOP, writ large, has “never, never been weaker.”
There’s no evidence that Jackson has literally bribed politicians, but there’s plenty of evidence that Collins has surrounded himself with people, including his own son-in-law, who have repeated antisemitic and white supremacist views.
“They’ve never been more disorganized. There is no coordination. There is no Georgia Republican Party,” Bailey said.
Josh McKoon would certainly take issue with that last point, since he chairs the Republican Party in the state. And even if Bailey is right that the coordination between the Jackson campaign, the Collins campaign and the party itself is minimal, the GOP has dominated the state power structure for as long as some voters have been alive. Muscle memory is powerful thing in politics, as is fear of the unknown.
But Bailey thinks that Ossoff and the rest of the Democratic ticket will be far preferable for voters than the struggling-to-keep-up status quo that millions of Georgia are facing today.
“At some point, people just get fed up, and enough is enough and we’re not going to take this anymore,” he said. “And that’s what we’ve been telling folks. You ain’t got to take it anymore, and you can choose something else.”
That “something else,” according to Bailey, is the Democratic ticket. Whether a majority of Georgia voters agree is what the sprint to November is all about.
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