WASHINGTON — Republican Clay Fuller won Georgia’s 14th Congressional District special election Tuesday, the seventh such contest since the 2024 general elections, filling the seat vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene in January ahead of this fall’s highly anticipated midterms.
Fuller beat Democratic candidate and former Army Brig. Gen. Shawn Harris. Fuller won by a margin of 12 percentage points, which represented the largest Democratic swing in any special election since the 2024 general election. President Trump carried the district, which is largely rural and spans the northwest corner of Georgia, by a margin of 37%.
In a country divided, experts have been watching the outcomes of these special elections in order to see how the broader electorate may vote come November. The trend has remained the same across each special election: a significant swing for the Democratic candidate.
Harris and Fuller were among 17 total candidates in the first round of the GA-14 special election, known as a “jungle primary”—the first round of a two-round election where all candidates run against each other to determine a runoff election between the two candidates with the highest vote share.
Eric Sands, the chair of the Department of Political Science and International Affairs at Berry College in Rome, GA, said the election was the litmus test for Democratic momentum and highlighted that he himself was approached by the Harris campaign.
“Fuller ran very self-consciously as a Trump Republican and emphasized the fact that Trump endorsed him,” he said. “Clay [Fuller] won by 12 points, which isn’t insignificant, but given that Trump carried the district by 37, that’s a substantial drop and Republican candidates are going to have to think really hard about how much they want to attach themselves to Trump.”
Prior to the special election, Harris—who had run against Greene in the 2024 House election for the same seat—said he felt the special election race was more winnable than his previous run for the seat because of Greene’s absence.
“When you get to a point in your career where they just say MTG, that means you have a pretty good brand,” Harris said in a phone interview. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is not running against me, and that completely changes everything.”
“Not only did we win, but we beat them all out,” Harris said, referring to the fact he received the highest share of votes in the first round with 37%. “That gave us momentum.”
In February, President Trump held a rally in Rome, GA, the largest city in Georgia’s 14th district, partly to campaign for and endorse Fuller. The town, at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, is diverse and less than an hour and a half by car from Atlanta.
“[Fuller] is a tough-on-crime District Attorney here in Northwest Georgia who helped achieve the feat of putting violent criminals behind bars where they belong,” Trump said at the time.
Harris, who was in Rome, GA, during the rally, said he didn’t believe the endorsement of Trump helped Fuller.
“When the President came here, there was really no traffic, and [Fuller] didn’t really get a bump,” Harris said. “And on top of that, Clay was running against [11] Republicans at the time and none of them dropped out…if President Trump’s word was so powerful, [Fuller] wouldn’t be as worried as he is.”
There was a huge push for voter turnout among Democrats trying to get him out to meet the voters, Sands said. “I had one of them come by my house and sell me the campaign pitch,” the political science professor said.
The National Republican Congressional Committee and Fuller’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the election.
“In Congress, Clay will be a strong ally for President Trump and help House Republicans grow the economy, secure the border, and keep Americans safe,” NRCC Chairman Rep. Richard Hudson (NC-9) said in a statement after the election.