Rich McCormick is headed for victory on election night in the race for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
McCormick, a Republican, had 155,889 votes to Democrat Bob Christian’s 93,843 votes with 16.6 percent of precincts reporting, according to unofficial results from the Georgia Secretary of State office.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick.
The win will bring back to the Republicans a once-safe seat held by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Senator Johnny Isakson, and former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.
The sea on the north side of Atlanta includes north Fulton County and rapidly growing Forsyth County.
It flipped to the Democrats in 2018, as suburban voters disenchanted with the Trump administration defected from Republicans at the polls.
That propelled to Congress gun-control advocate Lucy McBath, who lost a son when he was shot in a gas station by a white motorist who thought his music was too loud.
The Republicans in redistricting made the seat safer for the GOP, moving it further north and adding exurban and rural areas.
McBath chose to run instead in the neighboring 7th Congressional District covering suburban Gwinnett County, one of the most diverse districts in the country with larger Asian and Hispanic populations.
McCormick ran and narrowly lost in the old 7th District in 2020 to Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux, whom McBath defeated in this year’s Democratic primary.
At a campaign debate on Oct. 16, the two presented contrasting visions of government, Christian arguing for a more activist government working to solve problems and McCormick maintaining that government can mess up anything it touches.
Christian accused the Republican state government of having presided over numerous hospital closures, including this fall’s shutdown of the Atlanta Medical Center, a large hospital downtown.
McCormick said the hospital had to shut down because it depended too much on Medicaid reimbursement, which wasn’t enough to pay the bills.
McCormick, a former Marine, did several tours overseas as a pilot and then combat surgeon after attending med school. He now works as an emergency room doctor.
That experience, he said, brings him face-to-face with the nation’s economic and health realities.
He holds the unusual distinction of having been elected class president at the historically black Morehouse School of Medicine, which was 60 percent female and 80 percent minority.
Christian, a veteran who served in Iraq and later managed restaurants and dining facilities, addressed in his campaign the growth problems of the area, which has proved attractive to migrants leaving other cities and states during the COVID pandemic.
Its population grew by 75,000 during the pandemic, choking the highways. Forsyth is an attractive place to live for its proximity both to scenic North Georgia and to thousands of tech-related jobs just south of it in northern Fulton County.
Christian told The Epoch Times that the newcomers might make the area friendlier to Democrats if those who left blue states brought their voting patterns with them.
McCormick, for his part, said he looked to appeal more to minority voters, such as the tens of thousands of Indians and Koreans who live in the district, an opportunity Republicans had missed in the past.
