Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, says he will not run for reelection.
Representatives Tom Price and Paul Broun had both discussed challenging Chambliss in the primary.
While we’ll have to see who each party nominates, the state has not been kind to Democrats for a long while. The Democrats’ “last hurrah” was in 1998, when Roy Barnes was elected governor and Mark Taylor lieutenant governor; since then no non-incumbent Democrat has won a statewide race.
(Zell Miller, a Democrat so conservative that he spoke at the 2004 Republican convention, was appointed to a U.S. Senate seat following the death of Republican senator Paul Coverdell in July 2000. Miller won election to the four years remaining on Coverdell’s term in November 2000.)