Retired brigadier general Shawn Harris had been all geared up for a campaign to defeat Marjorie Taylor Greene next November, and then the far-right representative quit the field. Now he’s wondering what Republicans will throw at him.
In November, Greene announced she would resign from Congress rather than face a challenger backed by the president after she began disagreeing with Donald Trump’s policies on Iran, healthcare and the release of the Epstein files, opening the field for a successor.
“I don’t care who it is, but when we do our analysis – because Marjorie Taylor Greene was so far out there – we don’t see the Republican party, Donald Trump or the local Republican party getting somebody that’s closer to the center,” said Harris, a Democrat. “Because if you get somebody that’s closer to the center, then guess what? You got Shawn Harris.”
The soldier turned rancher won about 135,000 votes in a losing effort in 2024, a record in Georgia’s 14th district and three points ahead of Trump. “That’s good, but it’s no second place trophy in this thing,” Harris said. “It’s not little league soccer.”
The Cook Political Report still rates the district as R+19. Any Democrat running here has to earn Republican votes. But in a wave political year with Democrats overperforming in Republican districts, Harris believes Georgia’s north-western hill country is a battlefield that should not be ignored.
Republicans must choose between replacing Greene with a political extremist or a mainline conservative, which could alienate voters in either direction. Given the prospects of war and the controversies emerging from the Pentagon, Harris believes his centrist appeal as a former military professional will earn consideration.
“Right now, Congress is not doing their job. Period,” Harris said of military oversight, particularly of attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and the conduct of defense secretary Pete Hegseth. “I didn’t think he was the right person for the job, and it has proven over time that our secretary of war – or secretary of defense, whatever he wants to call himself – that this job is too big for him … If we would have put what he put on Signal, you and I would have been fired out of the military, probably be in Leavenworth and probably be doing time right now.”
Harris has commanded combat troops in Afghanistan, Liberia and elsewhere. His last assignment was as a military attache in Israel. He believes Congress has improperly ceded its authority to declare war and to set parameters for military action, espousing a philosophy drawing from axioms popularized by Colin Powell.
“Are we actually in a war or are we about to get in a war in the Caribbean?” he asked. “If we are in a war, we need to go through the step for Congress to declare that we’re in a war. Congress needs to ask – because oversight is something we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq – what is the end state? How do we know we actually have met our mission or won the war? Until Congress stands up and takes back their responsibility, I think you’re going to continue to see the president of the United States and the secretary of defense continue to push the envelope.”
Despite the slow boil of military activity in the background, Harris said that people in Georgia are more focused on economic issues and that Congress should be working on getting the cost of groceries to fall.
“The economy is very bad,” Harris said. “President Trump was just out in Pennsylvania trying to convince people that it is a hoax; people know that things cost more now. People know that. You don’t have to be told, you just know it, you can feel it across the board. Middle-class families are now struggling to pay the light bill, put food on the table, trying to figure out how they’re going to pay their rent or pay their mortgage.”
Harris collects canned goods at rallies to give to local food pantries for distribution, he said. Rural homelessness isn’t being addressed, in part because local leaders perceive it as an “urban” problem, he continued. The systems the federal government uses in a city like Atlanta to address homelessness and poverty needs to scale for places like Ringgold or Dalton.
“We just don’t talk about it,” Harris said. “When you see people in our small town that are homeless, they are probably sleeping in the woods somewhere, or sleeping in some abandoned old house … that you think is empty and you don’t know until it catches on fire.”
Harris has a lot to say about farming and the federal government, a product of his second life raising beef cattle. “We’re definitely in an agriculture recession, no ifs, ands or buts about it. And I don’t know what things are going to look like next year,” he said. “Georgia’s No 1 industry is agriculture and our district’s No 1 industry is agriculture, something you never hear Margie talk about.”
His investment in raising beef cattle on a ranch in the district is more permanent than Greene’s tenure, he said: “What we doing here on this farm, we are never leaving. Marjorie Taylor Greene could never say that. You can sell a house tomorrow, but when you invest in a farm and are putting up fences and all this kind of stuff, you are here for the long haul.”
