State Rep. Derrick Jackson to join governor's race this week
He said he will officially launch his 2026 campaign on Friday at Liberty Plaza at the Georgia State Capitol.
Jackson has served in the Georgia General Assembly representing District 68 since 2017.
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He cites as his qualifications '22 years of selfless service in the military, 10 years of strategic leadership in corporate America, and his current impactful fifth term as State Representative. His 42 years of proven leadership are a testament to his extraordinary capabilities.'
Jackson's Democratic primary bid follows his unsuccessful candidacy for lieutenant governor in 2022. He came in sixth in the Democratic primary, the Associated Press reports.
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Jackson joins three other Democratic primary candidates: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Georgia state Sen. Jason Esteves and Atlanta pastor Olu Brown.
Prominent Democrat Jason Carter, former President Jimmy Carter's grandson, has chosen not to run for governor because his wife is being treated for brain cancer.
A second prominent Democrat, Stacey Abrams, hasn't made her plans known yet, the Associated Press said.
Republican incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp cannot run for governor again because of term limits.
On the Republican side, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr is running for governor.
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UPI
25 minutes ago
- UPI
3 reasons Republicans' redistricting power grab might backfire
Texas state Democratic representatives, shown at a rally in Washington, previously left the state in 2021 to try to prevent the state's Republicans from reaching a quorum and passing new voting restrictions legislation. File Photo by Michael Reynolds/EPA The gerrymandering drama in Texas -- and beyond -- has continued to unfold after Democratic state legislators fled the state. The Democrats want to prevent the Republican-controlled government from enacting a mid-decade gerrymander aimed at giving Republicans several more seats in Congress. The Texas GOP move was pushed by President Donald Trump, who's aiming to ensure he has a GOP-controlled Congress to work with after the 2026 midterm elections. Other Republican states such as Missouri and Ohio may also follow the Texas playbook; and Democratic states such as California and Illinois seem open to responding in kind. But there are a few factors that make this process more complicated than just grabbing a few House seats. They may even make Republicans regret their hardball gerrymandering tactics, if the party ends up with districts that political scientists like me call "dummymandered." Democrats can finally fight back Unlike at the federal level, where Democrats are almost completely shut out of power, Republicans are already facing potentially consequential retaliation for their gerrymandering attempts from Democratic leaders in other states. Democrats in California, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, are pushing for a special election later this year, in which the voters could vote on new congressional maps in that state, aiming to balance out Democrats' losses in Texas. If successful, these changes would take effect prior to next year's midterm elections. Other large Democratic-controlled states, such as Illinois and New York -- led by Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Gov. Kathy Hochul, respectively -- have also indicated openness to enacting their own new gerrymanders to pick up seats on the Democratic side. New York and California both currently use nonpartisan redistricting commissions to draw their boundaries. But Hochul recently said she is "sick and tired of being pushed around" while other states refuse to adopt redistricting reforms and gerrymander to their full advantage. Hochul said she'd even be open to amending the state constitution to eliminate the nonpartisan redistricting commission. It's unclear whether these blue states will be successful in their efforts to fight fire with fire; but in the meantime, governors like Hochul and Pritzker have welcomed the protesting Democratic legislators from Texas, in many cases arranging for their housing during their self-imposed exile. Dummymandering Another possible problem for either party looking to gain some seats in this process stems from greediness. In responding to Democrats' continued absence from Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott threatened even more drastic gerrymanders. "If they don't start showing up, I may start expanding," Abbott said. "We may make it six or seven or eight new seats we're going to be adding on the Republican side." But Abbott might think twice about this strategy. Parties that gerrymander their states' districts are drawing lines to maximize their own advantage, either in state legislatures or, in this case, congressional delegations. When parties gerrymander districts, they don't usually try to make them all as lopsided as possible for their own side. Instead, they try to make as many districts as possible that they are likely to win. They do this by spreading groups of supportive voters across several districts so they can help the party win more of these districts. But sometimes the effort backfires: In trying to maximize their seats, a party spreads its voters too thin and fails to make some districts safe enough. These vulnerable districts can then flip to the other party in future elections, and the opposing party ends up winning more seats than expected. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as "dummymandering," has happened before. It even happened in Texas, where Republicans lost a large handful of poorly drawn state legislative districts in the Dallas suburbs in 2018, a strong year for Democrats nationwide. With Democrats poised for a strong 2026 midterm election against an unpopular president, this is a lesson Republicans might need to pay attention to. There's not much left to gerrymander One of the main reasons dummymandering happens is that there has been so much gerrymandering that there are few remaining districts competitive enough for a controlling party to pick off for themselves. This important development has unfolded for two big reasons. First, in terms of gerrymandering, the low-hanging fruit is already picked over. States controlled by either Democrats or Republicans have already undertaken pretty egregious gerrymanders during previous regular redistricting processes, particularly following the 2010 and 2020 censuses. Republicans have generally been more adept at the process, particularly in maximizing their seat shares in relatively competitive states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina that they happen to control. But Democrats have also been successful in states such as Maryland, where only one Republican serves out of nine seats, despite the party winning 35% of the presidential vote in 2024. In Massachusetts, where Democrats hold all eight seats, Republicans won 37% of the presidential vote in 2024. There's also the fact that over the past half-century, "gerrymanderable" territory has become more difficult to find regardless of how you draw the boundaries. That's because the voting electorate is more geographically sorted between the parties. This means that Democratic and Republican voters are segregated from each other geographically, with Democrats tending toward big cities and suburbs, and Republicans occupying rural areas. As a result, it's become less geographically possible than ever to draw reasonable-looking districts that split up the other party's voters in order to diminish the opponents' ability to elect one of their own. Regardless of how far either party is willing to go, today's clash over Texas redistricting represents largely uncharted territory. Mid-decade redistricting does sometimes happen, either at the hands of legislatures or the courts, but not usually in such a brazen fashion. And this time, the Texas attempt could spark chaos and a race to the bottom, where every state picks up the challenge and tries to rewrite their electoral maps - not in the usual once-a-decade manner, but whenever they're unsatisfied with the odds in the next election. Charlie Hunt is an associate professor of political science at Boise State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.

Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
What the new China chip taxes tell us about doing business in Trump's America
Depending on your age, you might think I'm describing Soviet-era Russia — or Russia in the Putin era. You'd certainly think about modern-day China, where the government is an official partner in many private companies, and has unofficial but meaningful influence over most of them. And in 2025, you might also think that's beginning to describe America in the second Trump administration. Last week, for instance, Donald Trump called on the CEO of Intel to resign because of his past business connections to China. In June, Trump approved Nippon Steel's plan to buy US Steel — but only after the US government was granted a " golden share" in the company that gives Washington the ability to approve or veto some actions, like closing plants. In January, Trump floated the idea of having the US government own a portion of TikTok's US operations. And now Trump is requiring Nvidia and AMD to hand over 15% of revenue from high-end chip sales to China, as first reported by the Financial Times. (Nvidia has released a statement noting it "follow[s] rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets," without addressing reports about the deal directly; AMD and the White House have yet to comment.) You can make arguments for or against any one of these transactions — US chip sales to China have been a particularly divisive issue, even within the Trump administration. But taken together, there's little question that in Trump 2.0, we should expect the federal government to insert itself into private business. Call it "state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises," Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip wrote Monday morning. It's an exceptionally timely piece he appears to have written before the Nvidia/AMD story broke, because it doesn't contain any reference to it. (You can make the list of Trump's interventions even longer if you'd like: He personally required former Paramount owner Shari Redstone to pay him $16 million to settle a seemingly specious lawsuit, for instance. And Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, has required Paramount's new owners to promise to " root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media." You could also include the concessions Trump is demanding from some of the nation's most prestigious universities and law firms.) The chip story is particularly hard to get your head around, since it inverts the premise of the tariff plans Trump has been pushing this year. Instead of taxing goods made overseas and imported into the US, the US is now taxing goods made by American companies, in America — the thing he supposedly wants to see much more of. It's not surprising to see Donald Trump say one thing and do another. And half a year into his second presidency, it's no longer surprising to see the Republican-controlled Congress let him do just about anything he wants: This is the same Congress that passed a law last year requiring TikTok's US operations to find a US buyer or shut down — and hasn't said a word about the fact that Trump has decided to ignore that law, repeatedly. And again, you might not care about the moves the Trump administration has made to steer companies to date. You might even like them. But the odds are increasing that he's going to end up involving the federal government in an industry or company you do care about. Maybe one you work in. How are you going to feel about it then?


San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ousted FDA vaccine chief Vinay Prasad is returning to the agency
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