With early voting set to begin the following morning, Georgia gubernatorial candidate and former State Senator Jason Esteves hosted a rally at a brewery on Sunday. The rally was a kickoff to early voting for the upcoming general primary election, which begins on Monday.
The rally drew a multiracial, multigenerational crowd of supporters, the kind of coalition Esteves argues is the only path to flipping the governor’s mansion for Democrats for the first time in 30 years. His campaign’s pitch centers on what he describes as three pillars of health, wealth, and opportunity, issues he says transcend party lines.
“No matter what you believe in and who you are, you ultimately care about making sure that you and your family have access to health care, that you can afford to buy a home in this state, and that you can live in a safe community where your child has access to a great public school,” Esteves said.
Esteves, a former Atlanta Board of Education chair, leaned heavily on his lived experience as a small-business owner and caregiver throughout the evening. In his remarks to the crowd, he spoke about stepping in to wash dishes at one of his family’s restaurants when a worker walked out, calling it the kind of firsthand experience that sets him apart from other candidates in the field.
“What makes me unique is the fact that when I talk about my experiences, it’s not some theory or policy memo or a poll that informs me on the issues,” he said. “It’s my lived experiences.”
On education, one of his signature issues, Esteves took aim at what he characterized as the hollow promise of graduation rates that have climbed while literacy rates have fallen.
“We cannot be behind Mississippi in anything, and we are behind them when it comes to the work they’re doing around literacy,” he said, pledging to increase teacher pay, invest in early learning, and expand workforce pathways beyond a four-year college degree.
The rally drew supporters from across the political and media landscape. State Rep. Nikki Merritt, who has worked alongside Esteves in the legislature, offered one of the evening’s more personal endorsements.
“This is the same person that I know,” Merritt said. “Someone who is hard working, someone who is committed, and someone who knows how to put people over politics.”
Former state Sen. Jason Carter, grandson of President Jimmy Carter, also spoke, drawing a contrast between Esteves and the Republican field.
“We don’t want ads,” Carter told the crowd. “We want somebody who understands in their heart what the issues are.”
Among those in attendance was YouTube personality and political commentator Philip DeFranco, host of The Philip DeFranco Show, whose news commentary channel has amassed more than 6.6 million subscribers. DeFranco said Esteves’ coalition-building ability and focus on affordability brought him to the event.
“A lot of his values, a lot of what he’s going for, it’s common sense,” DeFranco said. “It’s not these culture war things that take you left and right and off the message.”
Carl Hill, External Affairs Director for Atlanta Public Schools, said small business was the cornerstone issue drawing him to the polls.
“Small businesses must thrive,” Hill said. “You need to have a vitality of not only our local neighborhoods in Atlanta, but also the local neighborhoods throughout the state.”
DeFranco, who described himself as a small business owner, said Esteves’ pitch felt personal. “Whether it’s who I was 20 years ago trying to start, or someone I see myself as now as a small business owner that’s doing very well, it’s just stuff that makes sense,” he said.
Esteves closed the evening with a direct appeal to voters headed to the polls the following morning, invoking Georgia’s history of unlikely political victories, from Jimmy Carter’s rise from the school board to the governorship, to the 2020 Senate wins of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
“If you’re tired of the same old politics and the politicians that got us into many of the crises that we are in, then I’m asking for your vote,” Esteves said. “That’s a vision for the future of the state that gives people something to vote for, not just someone to vote against.”
