By Jayla Whitfield-Anderson, Rich McKay and Nathan Layne
ROME, Georgia, March 10 (Reuters) – The Republican candidate backed by President Donald Trump will advance to a runoff against a Democrat in the Georgia race to replace Marjorie Taylor Greene in the U.S. House of Representatives, after a special election on Tuesday seen as a test of Trump’s sway over his party.
Trump’s preferred candidate, former district attorney for four northwest Georgia counties Clay Fuller, will face Shawn Harris, a moderate Democrat who has sought to court disillusioned Trump voters, in the April 7 runoff.
Harris won 37.3% of the vote while Fuller topped a crowded Republican field of a dozen candidates with 34.9%, according to Georgia’s Secretary of State. With no candidate securing a majority, the top two will face off next month, with Fuller favored in the staunchly conservative district.
The race has drawn outsized national attention because it offers an early measure of Trump’s grip on his base in a district that has been a stronghold of his Make America Great Again movement and was thrust back into the spotlight by last year’s public split between Trump and Greene.
Fuller easily outpaced other Republicans, signaling Trump’s enduring sway over his MAGA base. He beat the next closest one, conservative former state senator Colton Moore, who describes himself as Trump’s top defender, by more than 20 percentage points.
“Trump’s endorsement did the job,” said Jeffrey Lazarus, a political science professor at Georgia State University, predicting that Fuller would consolidate the Republican vote and defeat Harris in the runoff. “The smart money is on Fuller.”
Fuller, who was a White House fellow during Trump’s first term and is a lieutenant colonel in the Georgia Air National Guard, told Reuters that he viewed Tuesday’s result as an “absolute win” even if he didn’t avoid the runoff.
Fuller supporter Brian Crisp agreed.
“With so many Republicans in the race, we were thinking he might get 25% or 27%,” Crisp said at Fuller’s watch party in Rome, a city in the heart of the district. “So he’s gotten way above that. And it’s looking really good for the next election.”
Harris, a cattle farmer and a retired brigadier general, faces long odds in a district he lost to Greene by 29 percentage points in 2024. He told his supporters on Tuesday to get back to work on Wednesday making calls and knocking on doors.
“Don’t let anyone tell you that a Democrat can’t win in northwest Georgia,” he told a gathering of some 100 people, who celebrated the vote tallies with hugs and back slaps. “April 7 is coming… We don’t have time to waste.”
Georgia’s 14th Congressional District is a mostly blue-collar corridor from Atlanta’s suburbs north to the Tennessee border. Greene won the seat in 2020 and quickly became one of MAGA’s most outspoken national figures.
Greene split with Trump in late 2025 after she went against his wishes by pushing for the release of investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The winner of the runoff 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.
That race will be part of November’s general election, when all 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate’s 100 seats will be at stake. Democrats are aiming to take control of the House but face longer odds in the Senate.
Tuesday’s contest took place less than two weeks after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, a move that poses political risks for Trump and Republicans at a time when voters have made it clear they are more concerned with domestic issues, including affordability and healthcare.
Amanda Reisner, 42, a surgical technologist from Rome, said she believed Harris, who has been trying to court Republicans and independent voters with a message focused on cost-of-living issues, could defy the odds.
“He’s the first politician that got me out of my house, and I know he can go all the way on this one,” Reisner said.
(Reporting by Jayla Whitfield-Anderson in Lookout Mountain, Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne; Writing by Nathan Layne and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Ross Colvin, Scott Malone, Alistair Bell, Cynthia Osterman, Edmund Klamann and Stephen Coates)
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