A special House election in former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conservative Georgia district offers one of the first electoral tests of how voters are responding to the Iran war, a divisive issue that is beginning to shape this year’s midterms.
The election on Tuesday, a runoff in the rural northwest corner of the state, features two military veterans with starkly different positions on the war. The race has played out as Ms. Greene, a Republican who has not endorsed a candidate, has echoed the underdog Democratic candidate in forcefully condemning the conflict.
The Democrat, Shawn Harris, a cattle farmer and retired Army brigadier general, has put his opposition to the conflict at the core of his closing pitch. Like many in his party, he says the war is needlessly risking American lives and driving up fuel prices.
The Republican candidate, Clayton Fuller, a former local prosecutor and Air National Guard veteran, says the war is keeping Americans safe. He has proudly pointed to an endorsement he received from President Trump.
Ms. Greene has underscored her opposition to the war in the closing days of the race. She resigned from Congress at the start of the year, prompting the special election.
In March Mr. Harris was the leading vote-getter in the initial 17-candidate election that sent the race to a runoff. But a Republican-dominated field split the conservative vote last month, and Mr. Harris enters the runoff facing a steep uphill climb in a district Mr. Trump carried by a wide margin. Ms. Greene beat Mr. Harris by 29 percentage points in 2024.
Political observers will be watching the margin on Tuesday for hints of how the war and other factors, such as immigration and the economy, could affect the November midterms.
Here’s what to know:
Who are the candidates and what have they said about Iran?
Mr. Harris, 60, is a second-time candidate whose nearly four-decade career in the military included service as a combat infantry commander in Afghanistan. He was awarded a Bronze Star. His last assignment was in Israel.
Even before the Iran war, he centered his campaign platform on lowering prices. Now he is arguing that Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war is squeezing Georgians’ finances.
“The price of gas and diesel and fertilizer costs is killing us,” Mr. Harris said in an interview.
Mr. Fuller, a 44-year-old former college basketball player at Emory, was until recently the district attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit. In 2024, he was deployed with the Air National Guard to the Al Udeid Air Base, the regional air headquarters of the U.S. Central Command in Qatar. (The base has come under attack from Iran during the war.)
Mr. Fuller has not focused heavily on the war, preferring to highlight his support for Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. But in a debate hosted by the Atlanta Press Club in partnership with Georgia Public Broadcasting last month, he stood behind the war.
“Our country is safer because of what President Trump has done regarding Iran,” Mr. Fuller said, describing the Iranian government as a “death cult that could not be negotiated with.”
What is Greene saying?
Ms. Greene, once a staunch supporter of Mr. Trump, broke with him over a number of issues. Although she has not publicly taken a side in the election, she has been chastising the president over the war in recent days.
“Where has this man gone?” Ms. Greene wrote on Saturday on social media over a screenshot of a 2019 post by Mr. Trump saying that the United States had made a grave mistake by fighting wars in the Middle East.
What happened in the first round?
No candidate won an outright majority in the election on March 10, forcing a runoff under state law. Mr. Harris won 37 percent of the vote, and Mr. Fuller won 35 percent of the vote.
Although Mr. Harris was the leading vote-getter, his share of the vote fell far short of the Republicans’ cumulative share.
What will the parties be watching?
Democrats have done well in special elections during Mr. Trump’s second term, and a competitive performance by Mr. Harris on Tuesday, even in defeat, could offer another warning signal for the Republican Party.
The war has sent the average price of a gallon of gasoline above $4 nationally, and polls show that the conflict is broadly unpopular. Mr. Trump has said he aims to end the war within a few weeks, but talks to wind down the conflict have shown scant progress, and economists say that even if the fighting is stopped it may take months before surging energy prices begin to ease.
Georgia is a swing state, and one of its Democratic senators, Jon Ossoff, is up for re-election this year.
Some Republicans in the state have dismissed the attention being focused on Tuesday’s election, arguing that Mr. Fuller is positioned to win comfortably in the 14th Congressional District.
“I expect it to be a relatively early night,” Josh McKoon, chair of the state Republican Party, said in an interview, adding, “I think that Clay will win by a significant margin.”
But Mr. Fuller has urged Republicans not to “take this for granted.”
“It would be a tragedy for Georgia-14 if a Democrat won this seat,” Mr. Fuller told “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show” last month. “It would be a tragedy for the MAGA movement and for President Trump.”
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