Georgia’s Bishop facing toughest race since 2010
After years of coasting to reelection, Georgia’s senior congressman is gearing up for his toughest campaign in more than a decade as hopeful Republican challengers crowd the May 24 primary ballot and raise impressive sums of cash to target the Democrat who’s held the seat for 30 years.
Rep. Sanford Bishop, a Black Democrat first elected in 1992, has been rated among the most vulnerable House Democrats in the fall midterms by his own party. The Republican-controlled state legislature last year redrew his 2nd District seat in southwest Georgia to dilute the influence of Black voters.
Republicans need to gain just five U.S. House seats to win control of the chamber in November. The GOP is betting that low approval of President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress will make it hard for Bishop to maintain support from rural voters who previously supported him.
“People in our rural communities have been struggling over these decades,” said Jeremy Hunt, one of six candidates seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Bishop. “A lot of the people in our district, regardless of how they might have voted in the past, are saying, ‘We are ready for something new.’”
In a battleground state where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock are both waging closely watched statewide campaigns, Bishop’s is the only congressional seat out of 14 in Georgia in that the opposing party sees as posing real possibility of flipping.
Bishop, 75, became the senior congressman in Georgia following the 2020 death of Rep. John Lewis. He’s also the state’s only Democratic and Black member of Congress outside metro Atlanta.
He admits to sometimes walking a political tightrope on divisive issues, such as his 2010 vote in favor of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. On the other side of the spectrum, Bishop touts himself as a supporter of gun rights and once earned high ratings from the National Rifle Association. In recent years, he’s supported enhanced background checks for gun purchases.
Bishop largely seeks to downplay partisanship and highlight his influence as a member of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, where he chairs a subcommittee that oversees agriculture spending. He played a key role in passing $19.1 billion in disaster aid in 2019, nearly a year after Hurricane Michael devastated crops in Bishop’s district.
Campaigning in recent weeks, Bishop has been busy delivering oversized ceremonial checks — $11.4 million in pandemic recovery funds to a technical college, $1 million for two mobile hospital clinics, $1 million to upgrade a rural city’s water and sewer system, and $500,000 for a local Urban League chapter to repair and improve its headquarters.