Rick Williams was the only candidate to qualify last week for the Georgia State Senate in District 25, meaning the Milledgeville funeral home director is assured of a third term in the capital.
Williams, 74, was first elected in 2022 after Burt Jones, who was District 25’s state senator at the time, decided to run for lieutenant governor. Jones won that race, and now he’s running for governor.
Prior to that, Williams served in the Georgia House of Representatives, first winning a term in 2016 and replacing Rusty Kidd.
District 25 covers all of Baldwin, Jones, Putnam, Jasper and Butts County, as well as a sliver of Bibb and Henry County. The State Senate is considered the 'upper chamber' and has 56 members, while the Georgia House of Representatives has 180 members.
Meanwhile, Floyd Griffin is seeking a second term to the Georgia House of Representatives in District 149. Griffin first became the District 149 representative after defeating incumbent and old political foe Ken Vance in 2024. Baldwin County’s House of Representative seat became much less Republican friendly after a 2023 court decision forced Georgia to redraw its voting map.
District 149 basically includes everything in Baldwin County west of the Oconee River, a snaky sliver of south Jones County, as well as a section of East Macon.
That particular stretch of Macon includes roughly 10,000 registered voters, and the majority are African-American.
Back in 1994, Griffin became the first African-American since Reconstruction elected to the state senate in Georgia from a majority white district. Eight years later, Griffin became Milledgeville’s first African-American mayor. After that, however, Griffin didn’t didn’t fare so well in campaigns. He came up short in two subsequent mayoral elections, and he also came up short in a 2010 run for state senate and a 2016 bid for state representative. Griffin then finished fourth out of five democrats in the 2022 Secretary of State primary.
All of that set the stage for Griffin’s 2024 political comeback at the age of 79. Griffin will be opposed in the May primary by Ross Sheppard, a Georgia College & State University graduate who ran for Milledgeville City Council while in college. Sheppard later purchased and rehabilitated the long-neglected Rockwell House on Allen Memorial Drive.
'I’m a proud resident of the Southside of Milledgeville, a neighborhood that has suffered from underinvestment and disinvestment for too long,' writes Sheppard on his campaign website – rossforga.com 'I have 5 years of experience under the Gold Dome, having worked as a legislative aid in college for State Rep.
Rusty Kidd and later as a lobbyist. This combined experience taught me how the sausage is made and fostered relationships that are crucial to getting things done in Atlanta.'
On the Republican side, meanwhile, Milledgeville businessman Randy Peters qualified and will take on the winner of Griffin and Sheppard in the November general election. Peters is expected to launch his campaign website in the coming days.