Everton Blair won the special election runoff to serve the remainder of David Scott’s term in Georgia’s 13th District, moving ahead of Marcye Scott in the race to fill the seat after Scott’s death. NBC News projected Blair as the winner on Tuesday, when he held a 53% to 47% lead with 84% of the expected vote tallied.
The result gives Blair the short-term House seat in a district that will still choose a separate winner later this year. Jasmine Clark has already won the regularly scheduled primary and is the heavy favorite for the November election, which means Blair’s victory settles only the balance of the current term.
What makes the runoff notable is how Blair got there. He had trailed Marcye Scott in the first round last month, 46% to 38%, after both advanced from a crowded all-party special primary election in July with no majority winner. That first-round gap made the runoff the real test of whether Blair could turn a broader field into a one-on-one win.
Blair ran on a sharply progressive platform, backing a tax on households making over $50 million, Medicare for All, universal child care and large federal spending on clean energy. Marcye Scott framed her own campaign as a way to “ensure the work already underway” would continue, a contrast that reflected two different ideas of how to carry forward the seat once held by David Scott, who died at 80 on April 22 after more than two decades in Congress.
The district has long leaned deep-blue in the Atlanta suburbs, which helps explain why the runoff was about which Democrat would finish the term rather than which party would control the seat. Blair also lost the regularly scheduled primary to Clark, so Tuesday’s win does not end the larger fight for the district. The practical question now is narrower: how many votes are ultimately certified once the runoff count is finished, and how much of Blair’s comeback was already locked in before the final ballots were added.
The immediate answer is that Blair will take the temporary seat, while Clark remains the favorite to hold the district in November. By then, the runoff will matter less as a race than as a marker of how quickly Blair overcame a first-round deficit and turned it into a House victory.
