This morning, State Senator Jason Esteves of Atlanta formally announced his candidacy for governor of Georgia. Esteves and I have spoken before here in the Atlanta Objective, when the former chairman of the Atlanta School Board had been contemplating a run for the state senate.
Esteves, 41, is an attorney (and also a restaurateur, more on that in here), who has worked as counsel for Equifax. The Teach for America alumnus helped guide Atlanta’s schools through the aftermath of the cheating scandal and the first stages of the pandemic shutdown.
He’d been planning a run for a while, and at the time we spoke would have been facing Congresswoman Lucy McBath among others for the Democratic nomination.
When Sen. Esteves and I spoke, McBath was still an active candidate. McBath candidacy muscled out most of the other people one might have expected to take a shot, since she has a national profile and with it the ability to raise national dollars. But three weeks ago, McBath suspended her campaign, citing complications in her husband’s cancer recovery.
For once, I’m going to post the audio. This interview is edited for clarity and to make both of us sound as smart as our parents think we are.
Q&A: An Interview with State Senator Jason Esteves
Interview by George Chidi
George Chidi: Good. So, I'm here with Senator Jason Esteves. How are you?
Sen. Jason Esteves: I am … living … with this legislative session going the way it has gone.
There are a lot of issues that Georgians are dealing with. And you can go through the list—whether it's healthcare, whether it's housing, whether it's trying to find a good-paying job and not having to work two to three jobs at a time. I mean, there are a lot of different issues. And when you have $16 billion in surplus, you would think that we would have leadership in the state that would be trying to alleviate the pressure that people are feeling. But the reality is that they're not. And I often find myself swimming against the current, trying to advocate for people who do not have the support they need from Republican leadership in this state—which is crazy, given the stats.
George Chidi: Funny you bring that up. So last week, Congressman Hank Johnson and Congresswoman Nikema Williams were pushing information around Medicaid, because it looks like there's a big Medicaid cut that's on the table at the federal level. And the thing I’m sort of looking at is, Georgia is a non-Medicaid expansion state. The rationale for that was, “Well, we're afraid they're going to pull the rug on us.” Well, the rug pull is happening. But when that happens, you're going to end up with a lot of people who are maybe going to lose their housing or going to lose their medical coverage. Do you think there's an appetite—if there's a big change at the federal level around who gets what—for the state to use some of that $16 billion to stopgap?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah. Well, I'm not sure we'll have a choice. Because while a lot of folks are focused on the Medicaid cuts—which are going to hurt working families, especially those on the lower-income scale—significantly, there is a much bigger chunk that's on the horizon, which are those who are on Georgia Access, which is the Affordable Care Act equivalent in Georgia, the local exchange here in the state.
About a million and a half people are on Georgia Access, the vast majority of which—I think 1.3 [million]—are on enhanced subsidies from the federal government. Those subsidies make purchasing those plans affordable. Those subsidies expire this year. And unless Congress approves those, it looks like we could have up to 1.3 [million], but very likely about a million people, who are not eligible for Medicaid right now, who would no longer have insurance.
So, you add in the million people who don't qualify for Medicaid anyway but are going to lose coverage because of the lack of subsidies, and then you add in the cuts to Medicaid, and we're going to find ourselves with maybe a million and a half people without health insurance, without subsidies for food, for housing, for transportation. We're going to be in a crisis here pretty soon.
And part of this is self-caused—not by the failure to expand Medicaid, but the failure to invest in working families. Had we had a stronger healthcare system, then we might be able to withstand this pressure, like you can in other states. But Georgia has seen a fair number of hospital closures. We've seen workforce shortages already when it comes to healthcare. So, this is just going to exacerbate that issue.
George Chidi: I'm sort of thinking about that. I mean, on the one hand, we lost Wellstar up the street. And on the other hand, we could talk about any of a half a dozen different hospitals around the state—usually rural, usually surrounded by Republican voters.
The thing I keep looking at with all of this is: at what point do Republican voters start to make demands that Republican legislators have to listen to? I mean, it's not just the federal stuff—it's the state level. So—and I'm asking you this in this context—you’re talking about running for higher office. Is this the kind of conversation you're going to have to have?
Sen. Jason Esteves: I think regardless of what I choose to do, or what anyone else is doing on the Democratic side, Democrats should be speaking to Georgians across the state—whether they live in urban centers or rural Georgia.
Republicans have failed Georgians for decades, and we've seen it. And to your point, folks in rural Georgia have high rates of poverty. Congressional District 2, for example—Southwest Georgia, which is where I'm from, in Columbus—has one of the highest food insecurity rates in the country. And you had a governor who was rejecting federal dollars for two years in a row that would help feed hungry kids. That’s over $100 million last year rejected in federal funding. And in lieu of that, the state provided, I think, $10 or 15 million dollars.
So, we're literally leaving money on the table, which means food is being left off the table for our kids.
What we should be doing as Democratic leaders is speaking directly to those concerns. And Democrats have oftentimes chased Republicans, in my opinion. Whatever Republicans talk about is what we talk about. We need to change that strategy and be laser-focused on economic issues. Because if we focus on the fact that we have the third highest rate of seniors living in poverty, that one in five children around this state live in poverty, that we have in metro Atlanta one of the highest unbanked populations in the country—if we talk about economic opportunity in a very concrete way, and talk about how our solutions would break that cycle, break the crises that we have in multiple areas—then I think we win over some of those Republican voters. Not all of them, but there are many more issues than just economics …
George Chidi: (interjecting) … you don’t actually have to win all of them …
Sen. Jason Esteves: You don't have to win all of them. It's just closing gaps. And we're not going to close gaps focused on “Donald Trump this, Donald Trump that.” We're going to close gaps if we focus on the bad stuff going on in Washington, but also highlighting the terrible stuff that is going on here—and what we would do differently.
And I think that’s the key—what we would do differently. It goes beyond just talking about the bad, because there is a lot of bad. But we have to talk about what we would do differently.
George Chidi: That sounds dangerously close to a plan, let me tell you. I mean, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about everything that’s been happening in the last six months, and the thing that I keep hearing over and over again is, “We need a plan.” Somebody needs to tell us what to do.
Like, I was at Nikema Williams’ thing last week, and it was supposed to be about Medicaid, but half the people in the audience said, “Tell us what—give us a plan. What are you doing? What should we be doing?” Apparently, at the Ossoff and Warnock thing a couple of days ago, there was a lot of, “Tell us what to do.”
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah. I heard it
George Chidi: What do you think of this cri-de-coeur for a plan?
Sen. Jason Esteves: I mean, I think it's—when we’re in crisis, and it is intensifying like it has in the last couple of months, people tend to look around and say, “Hey, where's leadership?”
And the reality is, Democrats have not been at the forefront because we got knocked in the mouth in November. So, we’re kind of stumbling to our feet. But people don’t want to—they can’t wait for that. They’re asking what the plan is.
As I look at the elections this year—which are municipal and local elections, and Public Service Commission elections—and then I look at 2026, where we have statewide offices and legislative offices on the ballot, as well as some local elections, I think that we need to leverage this opportunity by presenting a plan for the future of Georgia that will keep money in people’s pockets, and help them grow that money. That’s the important part: help them grow that money. And help secure Democratic majorities not only at the state level, but also at our local levels.
That plan is not something I came up with. That plan was deployed by Republicans 20 years ago—and it worked perfectly. But it’s about getting beyond the performative. There are a lot of folks giving speeches. There are a lot of folks talking about what we should be doing. It takes getting into these rooms—getting into committee rooms, getting into city council meetings, getting into school board meetings, coming down to the state Capitol—and actually engaging in the process.
Unfortunately, there is no shortcut when it comes to democracy. And it just takes us investing that time over the next several years to take our state back—and to take our country back.
George Chidi: Do you think getting municipal leaders, state-level leaders, Democratic leaders, on the same sheet of music—to the degree that you can ever get a bunch of people in the same sheet of music—executing in a non-performative way, as you say... I'm thinking about just how hard that's going to be. We haven’t been good at that.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah, it’s incredibly challenging. But I’ll tell you this: there are no folks who work harder and know the issues on the ground better than those local officials. I think they’ve been underutilized in the past by state leaders. I think they’ve been underappreciated.
Certainly, in my experience as a former school board member, I understand how critical it is to leverage the experts on the ground—who know these communities but are also residents of these communities and want to see them improve.
What we should be doing—and this is the way I've operated in the legislature—we should be figuring out how can we best support our local leaders in building and growing their community. Because I think if we do that, then ultimately that benefits our people. That benefits rural Georgia. It benefits Black people. It benefits folks in the city.
When we are working in silos—not in conjunction with, or we’re working in opposition to our local leaders—then we put them in a very tough spot. I feel like Republican leaders have certainly taken the position, especially in the last few years, of working in some ways in opposition to local leadership.
George Chidi: Yeah. I'm actually writing a book about that—especially the red-state, blue-city sort of hazard.
Let me step back for a second. For folks who don’t know you, tell people about your district. The area you represent. What have they been telling you?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah, so it's changed a bit. I am the state senator for Senate District 35. I used to be a state senator for Senate District 6. I’ll explain my prior district, and bring it back to the current district.
My prior district—I represented parts of Buckhead and East Cobb, Grove Park, but a lot of the wealthy part of northwest Atlanta.
George Chidi: Did you cover as far west as Collier Heights?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Not in my old district. I do now.
My old district was predominantly white and wealthy. My current district is middle and working class, predominantly Black, with a significant Latino population, as well as a white population. It represents Smyrna, Vinings, the northwest and west part of the city of Atlanta along 285, and then it includes the north side of the City of South Fulton.
It is not as high-income as my prior district, but I'll tell you that the issues are very similar. Folks are worried about healthcare—staying healthy. I have a lot of seniors in the district. They’re concerned about senior care and making sure they are growing old with dignity and with loved ones around them.
They are worried about housing and the high cost of housing—and the fact that Wall Street is buying up our single-family homes, making it more expensive to not only buy but also to rent. They're concerned about the high cost of taxes and what that does for their housing situation—whether you're talking about working families or anyone else.
There's a lot of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism that needs to be fostered and supported. So, I have a lot of folks asking me what the state could be doing to better support growing wealth in our community.
These are all issues—and then, of course, being a former school board member, being a former public-school teacher, education often comes up. Not only as preparing our children for the future, but also as a workforce issue: making sure that there is early ed, early childcare available, and that we have enough technical schools and technical training programs available, particularly in our low-income communities across the state and across the district, that can help prepare people if they want to change careers, or they’ve lost a career and are looking to rebuild.
So, it all ties back to these economic issues, which is why my focus on economic issues is not because of a poll or because of the last election. This is literally what people have been talking to me about for years. My issues have not changed, George. They've been very similar.
It is time for us—meaning Democrats—to stop ignoring those issues and actually bring them to the forefront and focus on them.
George Chidi: Part of the reason I asked about Collier Heights is because I’m writing a story for Canopy Atlanta about gentrification and their concerns—older Black middle-class residents in Collier Heights. Great community—fascinating piece of Atlanta history around there—but they’re worried they’re going to get pushed out of their houses because of taxes or folks from Wall Street coming in and buying up houses and whatnot. That is a really meat-and-bones sort of political problem to get at. Do you have thoughts about that?
Sen. Jason Esteves: And it's not just a fear. It's a reality. They've seen it happening. They’ve seen it happening with their tax bill, when seniors have seen their tax bill go from $1,000 to $4,000—if you’re on a fixed income, that breaks you.
Which is why I passed legislation to give seniors in the city of Atlanta, in particular, up to $1,000 off of their property tax bill related to APS taxes. I was able to negotiate that with the school system.
So that is real. It is also real that you have these foreign investors—and when I say “foreign,” I mean Wall Street, folks from out of the state—coming in and buying up thousands of homes. Literally thousands. Tens of thousands of homes.
George Chidi: I don’t know why the legislature hasn’t taken a stronger stand on that. Because that is not a partisan thing. That’s happening in everybody’s district.
Sen. Jason Esteves: It's happening everywhere. And it's driving up the costs.
I don’t know many people who can say that they don't know anyone who has been outbid by a cash offer. And when I say anyone, I mean—if you're trying to buy a million-dollar home or you're trying to buy a $200,000 home, you're still being outbid by cash offers. Which makes no sense, especially when those homes turn right back around after the closing to be rented. It’s clear what’s happening there.
In some of our counties around metro Atlanta and across the state, we see entire neighborhoods—
George Chidi: Yeah. I mean, there was one in Forsyth County. They were talking about—it was constructed brand new as rental single-family homes. Some Wall Street entity came in and bought the whole subdivision before it was even completed.
Sen. Jason Esteves: That’s right. There’s one close to my neighborhood—a neighborhood full of townhomes. It initially started in a hot market—for sale. And then all of a sudden, they converted them to rental.
George Chidi: Wait—which neighborhood is this?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Northwest—Bolton. Riverside. Go look at that. Because that’s—then all of a sudden, they were rentals. And people were like, “Well, that’s weird.” But yeah, the development was purchased.
So, these concerns are real. And when you look at historic Collier Heights—where you could put those houses, those beautiful homes, anywhere, and they would be crème de la crème as far as homes—but because they are in a legacy African-American community, they are devalued a bit. Now that is starting to change.
And when it’s on the cusp of benefiting these homeowners, they’re being pushed out—either by taxes or by these investors.
That’s something that causes me great concern—something that should be causing my colleagues on the other side a lot of concern. But they don’t want to do anything that impacts big business, because for years they have been in the pockets of these big businesses.
So, we have to constantly push back against the special interests that don’t want to see anything done. Just to give you an example, I proposed a bill that would allow counties—whether it's Fulton County or any other county—or cities, like the City of Atlanta, to create rental registries on properties that are high-volume investors. Right? I'm not talking about George, if you own a few properties. I'm talking about people who own 20 to 100 or more properties.
George Chidi: It blows my mind, by the way, that a municipality, by law, cannot keep a list of the rentals in their community.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Right. And for those of you who are wondering why that’s important—I'm a lawyer, so I know how this works—right now, companies and individuals use shell games, where they create a whole bunch of LLCs, whole bunch of limited liability companies, to hide their true identity.
I was literally in municipal court last week, and the judge called for CT Corporation—which is an agent that gets served papers. It’s a way for companies to hide who they truly are. And because of that, when there’s a violation of the law, whether it's code or any other law, it's nearly impossible to find who the actual owners are.
So, a rental registry would allow counties and cities to figure out who these people are, so that if they need to be held accountable, they can. It's something that counties and cities have been asking for for years. But big business has continued to stop any kind of legislation from going forward—including my legislation—for the last three years.
Why is that important? Because when you have an environment like we do here in Georgia, where investors see little downside—they see little risk. There’s no risk in me being found out—my true identity being found out. There’s little risk in me being held accountable. There’s little risk in a lawsuit being filed and me having to actually do right by my tenants.
If the downsides are so low that you're incentivizing a whole bunch of folks to invade the state—for lack of a better word—and buy up all of our single-family homes, then what we're doing is making it more expensive for someone who has lived here for most of their life, has worked very hard, to buy or rent a home—nearly impossible to remain in their neighborhood or to remain in a place where they want to live.
And to me, that's wrong. It should be a priority for us to stop.
George Chidi: I sort of tie this back to the tort reform—and the AJC, for once, actually has it right when they're calling this “lawsuit reform” or “change” or something other than “tort reform,” because of the bias of that term.
The tort reform legislation is garbage. And I have said so. I am troubled by how clearly certain special interests have influenced what that legislation looks like. It looks, for all the world, like it is there to defend Ford’s financial interest in the next rollover lawsuit—but also property owners who have been neglecting the safety of their properties.
When you combine the fact that it's hard to even find the right person with a tort situation where it becomes increasingly difficult to hold them accountable, I fear that we are deliberately attracting bad actors into the market.
Sen. Jason Esteves: We are incentivizing bad actors to come into this state and wreak havoc on the people we say we represent.
And to your point, my concerns with tort reform—or civil litigation reform, or however you want to call it—is that while there is some need for some little civil litigation reform—there are some changes, and I say that as a defense attorney—we need to make sure that the playing field is fair and balanced. I get that.
But what we saw was a bill that passed under the guise of helping people save on their insurance premiums—which we know won't go down. And in exchange for that relief, allegedly, we're going to make it harder for you to file a lawsuit if you get injured or killed.
And when you think about that exchange, it's something that is not fair and should continue to be called into question. But it's also not surprising, given where this administration and this leadership at the state has positioned itself as Republican leadership that is friendly and beholden to big business.
And I think—bringing it back to a plan—I think we need to call that out at every turn. And not run away from business like Democrats have done in the past. We are for business. Democrats like making money too. We are small business owners. We know how to run businesses very well.
We need to tell folks that Republicans in this state have been all for big business, while leaving small businesses behind, while leaving hard-working Georgians behind, and talk to them about how we will be different.
How, instead of us spending a couple billion dollars on Hyundai or Rivian, we would be spending a couple billion dollars on making sure that small business owners have access to capital—low-interest loans—and have access to tax credits and deductions so that they can grow their business and start businesses not only in urban centers, but across Georgia.
Because at the end of the day, Hyundai or Rivian or any other company is not going to come save us. We can only save our own communities.
George Chidi: I'm seeing some of the blowback. I mean, Georgia just lost a couple of big battery plants that it had pushed for—state subsidies, essentially. And they're like, “Oh no, never mind.”
And then you think about what those subsidies would have done if they were distributed in $50,000 grants to small businesses.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Totally. If you think about small squares across Georgia—it doesn’t matter where—whether it's Thomaston or Cordele or anywhere where folks are struggling to revitalize, and they're concerned because they've seen residents, they've seen their children leave and never come back.
No one's going to save them. These big corporations don't have those residents in mind. The only people that we can rely on are ourselves.
So as Georgians, we should be investing in ourselves instead of investing in these multinational corporations whose profits are going out of state to other shareholders. We should be investing in our small businesses, in our communities right here.
Because if you were born in a town here in Georgia, and you started a business like I have, a breakfast restaurant—
George Chidi: (incredulous) Wait, you started a breakfast restaurant?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Well, we’ll talk about that in a second, but my point is: if you have a restaurant, and you were raised in a town, you're going to invest not only in revitalizing that town, but you're going to hire local people. You're going to make sure that the profits benefit that local community—including yourself, of course—but you're going to keep that money there.
We’re literally spending billions of dollars to help corporations. Sure, they give us a few jobs—a few thousand jobs depending how big the size of the incentive is—but that's it. That's not actually building wealth in our communities.
If we want to build up our communities, we should be providing our small business owners with the type of capital and the type of tax incentives that you've seen Republican leaders provide these big businesses.
George Chidi: I agree with you. (pause) Breakfast place?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah. So, I am a small business owner. My wife and I own a couple small businesses. She owns an urgent care because she’s a medical practitioner, and then we franchised a breakfast restaurant. So, we have two now—one in Columbus, which is my hometown, and then we are opening one in Macon here in a few weeks.
George Chidi: I'll be darned.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah.
George Chidi: Congratulations.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Thank you.
George Chidi: Sounds like a pain in the ass, but congratulations—
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah, you know, it's—it is something that we—we are clearly in the service industry, when you think about what we do. Whether it's a restaurant, whether it's urgent care, whether it's me as a lawyer—we're all about service.
But I’ll tell you, owning those small businesses has further opened my eyes to the struggle that we have as a state, and the need for leadership to step up to address those challenges.
Just to give you an example, George—when I think about why people don’t—why my staff can’t come to work—top three reasons:
One is childcare. Two: healthcare. They're sick and they don’t have the health insurance needed to go see someone—or access. Three: transportation. Because they can’t afford to live close to where they work.
Does that sound familiar?
George Chidi: Yeah.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Sounds like part of the conversation we’ve been having, right? And that’s not isolated to just my business. That’s my wife’s urgent care. That’s the gas station. That’s the computer software company in Alpharetta.
I mean, we all have the same issues.
So, if we're truly trying to build a Georgia where everyone has the opportunity to thrive—regardless of where they live—then we would be tackling the issues that are common across these various communities.
And that’s not a Democrat–Republican thing. It’s not a Black–white thing. And it’s not a rural–urban thing. These are issues that we have across this state. And if we invested in our families like Brian Kemp likes to invest in these big out-of-state businesses, then we’d have a much different, more vibrant state.
George Chidi: Got one more question for you and I’ll get out of your hair. Medium term—say six to eighteen months—what kind of risks do you think this state is running? What are the big sort of political macroeconomic issues—what are the things people need to be looking out for?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yeah, I think our biggest risk is Donald Trump and the federal government. And I say that because Georgia, last year, received about $19 billion in federal funding.
When you think about the loss of revenue that we’re going to see—whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s the Department of Education, whether it’s hurricane relief—
George Chidi: I’m paying close attention to that.
Sen. Jason Esteves: A slow crawl of that funding, right. As we see Donald Trump and his co-president, billionaire Elon Musk, cut costs at the federal level so that they can pay themselves with a tax cut, we are going to see budget shortfalls in Georgia.
And it may not be this year, but we’ll definitely feel it in a year—and we’ll certainly feel it in two years. And the lack of investment by Georgia Republican leaders in our infrastructure—and when I say infrastructure, I mean beyond roads: it’s our healthcare system, it’s our education system, it’s our state agencies that provide all kinds of health and human needs—that lack of investment is going to come back to bite us.
We are going to have to figure out how to invest in ourselves, while at the same time fixing the damage that has been done by decades of disinvestment.
George Chidi: I'm trying to look at that from the perspective of a Republican—like a Republican lawmaker, Republican governor. I mean, you’d think they’d do the same math you can. Like, they’ve got to assume that something’s coming.
Never mind the recession that we’ve been expecting for the last three years that never hit—in part because we were well managed. But if a recession hits at the same time that a bunch of federal cuts hit—that’s a bad time. And I’m wondering: at what point do they go, “All right, we can see this coming. We need to be doing X, Y, and Z to get ready”? Like—“Yeah, we didn’t do the investments we should have, but this is what we’re going to do now to try to get through this.”
Is that a conversation that you’re actually hearing?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yes. Behind the scenes, there are Republican leaders who are concerned about what they’re seeing in Washington. But they’re too scared to say anything about it publicly. So, they’re working their back channels, hoping that Elon Musk and Donald Trump change their tune.
And I don’t know if they’ve ever seen or met Donald Trump and Elon Musk—but they’re going to do what they’re going to do. And they have only two people in mind when they do it: that’s Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
George Chidi: I’m just saying though—like, they know they can’t—they probably know they can’t change their minds. But they could see the train coming.
Sen. Jason Esteves: Yes.
George Chidi: I mean—do we, at what point do they—even if they’re not telling the public this because they don’t want to freak everybody out—do they start going, “Okay, maybe we should put a little money in this because we know that’s going to get smacked”?
Sen. Jason Esteves: We are slowly seeing it. Just to give you an example, I talked to you at the beginning about the enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act—Georgia Access—and how that’s going to expire this year, right?
We just heard a bill in Senate Finance that would provide employers with tax credits if they were to provide their employees with dollars to buy Georgia Access plans.
George Chidi: Right. So—I mean, separate from their salary? Like separate money?
Sen. Jason Esteves: That’s additional money. Okay? That is them slowly laying the groundwork for potential state subsidies of the Affordable Care Act. Now, they won’t say “Affordable Care Act,” because that’s “Obamacare,” and that’s terrible, right? That’s bad. But Georgia Access—which is essentially the same thing. That’s them laying the groundwork for that.
They know it’s coming, and they’re trying to prepare for it—but they’re doing it in a way that does not raise alarm with their base and their MAGA king.
George Chidi: So, now I’m torn. Because some part of me wants to go, “Okay, maybe we should look at this.” And then I’m like—“but if we do, am I going to tank it by drawing attention to it?”
Sen. Jason Esteves: There’s a big chance that you tank it if you draw attention.
George Chidi: Son of a—
Sen. Jason Esteves: It’s crazy. Yeah.
The unfortunate part about all this is that hardworking people across the state are going to be feeling the pain from what’s happening at the federal level—and the lack of investment at the state level.
And we have to come back—and this goes back to a plan—we, as Democrats, have to be prepared to not only call it out as an issue, but to actually have solutions. And be able to communicate those solutions in a way that makes sense to the average voter.
And that is going to be our challenge for the next sixteen to eighteen months: making sure that voters understand that our ultimate goal is to keep money in their pockets and to grow it.
And if we’re not talking about that—and this may be too strong of a phrase I’m going to use—but if we’re not talking about that, we’re going to lose. And our state cannot afford for us to lose another round.
George Chidi: Is there anything I should have asked you about—stuff that’s been on your mind that I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask?
Sen. Jason Esteves: Well, there’s a lot we can talk about. But no, I think this was a good conversation.
I do think that as we look toward the future, I believe this state has so much going for it, and we need to make sure that we’re fostering that and supporting that in a way that takes Georgia to the next level.
It’s unfortunate with what’s going on in Washington that we may hit a recession as a result, but I do think that Georgia—with the right investments—can withstand that recession and come out of it much brighter on the other side. But it’s about making sure that we invest in our people.
And if you hear anyone talking about investing in business—and big business in particular—or focusing on Trump, then we’re losing. We’re losing focus. We have to keep this about Georgia and investing in Georgians. And if we’re not—that should be the first bullet, second bullet, and third bullet.
George Chidi: All right. Thank you.
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