Republican Jason Dickerson handily won a runoff against Democrat Debra Shigley on Tuesday night in the state Senate District 21 special election to replace State Sen. Brandon Beach (R-Alpharetta), who is now the US Treasurer.
Dickerson and Shigley raised over one million dollars combined for the special election over the ostensibly safe GOP seat, which Beach won with 70.3% of the vote in 2024. The race drew national attention after Shigley finished a strong first in the Aug. 26 special election with against a field of six Republican candidates, including Dickerson.
Dickerson won with a decisive 61.5% of the vote (19,061 votes), but his Democratic challenger, Shigley, made inroads with voters. As a result, Dickerson underperformed Beach’s 70.3% margin in 2024 by almost nine percentage points.
To secure that victory Dickerson’s campaign spent over $751,000 for his campaign – $750,000 in loans he made to himself, according to Georgia campaign finance data. Shigley meanwhile, raised nearly $252,000, mostly in small donations from both voters in the district and out of state.
Although Shigley garnered 11,950 votes, improving on her Aug. 26 vote total of 8,438 votes, it wasn’t enough to win. Republican voters who were divided among six GOP candidates in the special election last month united behind Dickerson for the runoff.
The five Republican candidates who failed to advance to the runoff also spent big money, totaling almost $500,000 combined, mostly in self-loans, according to campaign finance data. That puts the total price tag of the election at about $1.5 million.
That amount is comparable to the nearly $1.5 million that Democratic challenger Ashwin Ramaswami and state Sen. Shawn Still (R-Norcross) reported combined spending for their hotly contested 2024 state senate race. Still retained his seat in the heavily Republican district.
Dickerson’s win on Tuesday maintains the GOP’s 33-23 seat advantage in the state senate.
“This campaign was never about titles or political games — it was about bringing our conservative common sense to the Gold Dome,” Dickerson said in a statement Wednesday. “Georgians want real-world solutions rooted in faith, family, and freedom — and that’s exactly what I’ll deliver.”
Georgia GOP chair Josh McKoon credited Dickerson’s victory to the party’s strong digital ground game. He said in a statement that the Republicans sent out tens of thousands of personalized text messages and targeted social media advertising. “Republicans cannot afford to sit on the sidelines in the digital space,” he added.
Charlie Bailey, who chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia, congratulated Shigley on her “impressive overperformance” in what’s considered a safe Republican seat. Shigley “forced Republicans to mount a full-scale campaign in this runoff and spend big to defend a district that went for Donald Trump by 34 points last year,” Bailey said in a statement.
“Republicans having to play defense in a ‘safe’ district is a sure sign they’ll continue struggling to defend their toxic agenda all the way through 2026,” Bailey added.
High-profile Democrats like Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, US Rep Lucy McBath (D-Atlanta) and Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin joined the Shigley campaign’s get out the vote efforts. The hope, still unrealized, was that voter anger against President Donald Trump would fuel a shock upset.
“Regardless of the outcome, Georgia voters sent a message to anti-abortion extremists across the country, and it is tremendous that, in a historically red district, a Democrat made this a competitive election,” said Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju. The progressive reproductive rights group had endorsed Shigley.