She may disarm you with her deep southern drawl, blown-out blond tresses, full makeup, and alluring smile, but do not underestimate the powerhouse that is state Sen. Jen Jordan, the Democratic candidate running for Attorney General in Georgia. She’s like many American moms: a self-proclaimed “bulldog” when it comes to fighting for her family, and now in her fight to protect families in Georgia.
With only a couple of weeks to go until the midterm elections and lots of uproar in Georgia politics—most recently, the truth bomb about Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker’s abortion scandal—Jordan is mired in a battle for the AG job. And she is quick to recognize the importance, now more than ever, of having a qualified Democrat fill the seat.
As for Walker, Jordan tells Daily Kos it’s “sad to watch” because the former Heisman Trophy winner is not much more than “a means to an end for the Republican Party and its leadership.” The evidence of this, she says, can be found in the way the party has reacted to news of Walker’s participation in abortion and the way they responded to people—like Walker’s own son—who called out the candidate’s hypocrisy.
“I think that this is really underscored by the fact that they [the GOP] immediately came out in support of [Walker] and attacked his son—who is no angel. Right. But whatever happened to ‘children are off limits’?”
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“It's just one of these things where it doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter about the character of someone, whether they have the experience, whether you trust them, even. None of that seems to matter on the Republican side anymore. It is literally just about holding all the power,” Jordan adds.
Jordan campaigns on her history of becoming a lawyer after leaving the poor, rural Georgia town where her single mother owned a beauty salon. And people in the state—mainly women—love her for that.
“People really do relate to the beauty shop part more than anything. Whether they grew up going to one, whether their mother was a hairdresser, clearly there are a lot of hairdressers out here. Yesterday I was at the grocery store, and a woman came up to me and was like, ‘I just wanted to tell you that I love the beauty shop stories. I went and got my hair done and told my hairdresser all about it.’ So it's like power to the hairdressers of the world. [...] What's fascinating about the hairdresser aspect of it is that they're small business owners.”
But, despite all the love and energy from Democrats in Georgia, it’s still Georgia. And Jordan knows the depths the GOP is willing to go to keep power, because she’s fought them tooth and nail. The first time, she spoke passionately in dissent against Georgia House Bill 481—the so-called “heartbeat bill” in 2019—openly and courageously recounting her own eight miscarriages and the death of her daughter, Juliette, whom she lost five months into her pregnancy, Atlanta magazine reports. More recently, she faced down former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 presidential election, when he and the Trump machine accused the state of Georgia of holding fraudulent elections.
“When we went into that Giuliani hearing, which none of us had gotten notice of, except for clearly the Trump press machine, [...] and then you kind of knew something was up, right? Like the fix was in at the time. [...] I was like, none of this holds water legally. None of this holds water factually. This is just a stunt,” Jordan says.
She adds that after seeing the Jan. 6 committee hearings, she believes that the “stunt” in Georgia was really the start of the “implementation of the [GOPs] plan.”
She says, “John Eastman was sitting there in the hearing in Georgia, giving them legal grounds for throwing away the electoral ballots, the electors who had been chosen by the voters. There were people that were giving them evidentiary grounds—in terms of showing them video that had been doctored—but showing them video to say, ‘See, there was not only is this mismanagement, but there's fraud and people stealing people's votes,’ and all that.”
Jordan says that the fact that Senate Bill 202, which was signed by Gov. Brian Kemp after the 2020 election, is allegedly “justified on the grounds of purportedly all of the bad stuff that happened, aka the Big Lie.”
She adds:
“That bill, while people have called it all kinds of things, really, at the end of the day, it gives elected officials, specifically Republicans who are in charge, a path to do what Trump wanted them to do in 2020, which they said that they couldn't legally do and didn’t have a legal path to do. [...] And the real concerns deal with these local elections offices and having the state Board of Elections really be controlled by partisans who, as we know, especially after the Herschel Walker thing, care more about partisanship than just about anything else and will do whatever they need to do to retain power or to get power.”
She says the only real oversight has come from the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, but it should be coming from the office of the current Republican Attorney General Chris Carr.
Carr was appointed to the position by Gov. Nathan Deal and sworn into office in 2016. Jordan calls Carr an “empty suit” who is “partisan” and simply a “politician” who “wasn't even an active member of the bar for, like, 18 years.”
“We've got somebody who comes from a very privileged background, who was appointed to be attorney general, who has never argued a case in court—literally, he has never argued a case in court—and he’s supposed to be the chief legal officer of this state? He has no business in that role,” Jordan says.
Jordan admits that her run will be uphill. Republicans in the state will vote Republican, despite controversies about abortions and despite how hard or not a candidate wants to work to change things. But she’s up for the match.
“We elected [Sen. Raphael] Warnock and [Sen. Jon] Ossoff, and so we know it can be done. [...] The fact that I was able to pull myself out of poverty and give my children the life they have and to live a life that I never thought I could ever live. And that is all because of government policies, right?
“I know it can happen because it happened in my life. And that's what I want to fight for because it's not really about my children. My children are fine. They're going to be okay. It is the children of these other hairdressers, these other waitresses, these other women who get up every single day and go to work, and the women in the lunch room at the schools. The bus drivers who are just trying to take care of their kids and really want their children to have a path that takes them somewhere better than where they are. And so I know it can happen. It happened to me, and if we work hard enough, we can get back to that place.”
The Good Fight is a series spotlighting progressive activists battling injustice in communities around the nation. These folks typically work to uplift those who are underserved and brutalized by a system that dismisses or looks to erase them and their stories.