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Side by side photos of candidates Carolyn Bourdeaux and Rob Woodall

Congressional race in North Georgia district a dead heat

It’s more than just the governor’s race that’s a toss-up in Georgia. A Democratic contender in the Congressional District 7 race — Carolyn Bourdeaux — is proving her mettle and putting up a fierce fight against Republican incumbent Rob Woodall.

According to recent polling, the candidates are neck and neck, with ten percent of voters undecided.

During the last midterm election in 2014, voter turnout in Gwinnett and Forsyth Counties (home to the 7th Congressional district) hovered around the fifty percent mark.

Progressives can no longer stand by and let only half of registered voters decide the fate of these elections. It’ll take all of us turning out to vote to flip districts like CD 7.

This will be the first serious challenge Woodall has faced since his election in 2011. Bourdeaux is a professor at Georgia State University in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. Previously, she was the director of the Georgia Senate’s Budget Office.

During a recent candidate forum in Peachtree Corners, Bourdeaux said she was motivated to run to protect access to health care. Like many voters she’s also concerned about the actions of the current president.

“I am running for office, though, because I think our healthcare system is badly broken and I think the choices made by those in Washington have made it much, much worse,” Bourdeaux said, according to Forsyth County News. “I am also running because we have a president who is corrupt and we have a Congress that is in hock to special interests, and I think we need a change.”

Meanwhile, Woodall has been on Better Georgia’s radar more or less since our founding, when he get caught repeating an absurd claim from the Mitt Romney campaign about who does and does not pay income tax.

And it’s only been downhill from there. He’s backed by the NRA and supported his fellow Georgia representative Karen Handel in pushing anti-abortion legislation through the House.

He also voted for Trumpcare, even though it would have cost 71,000 people in his district access to health insurance.

Bourdeaux challenged him on that vote at the Peachtree Corners candidate forum.

“This is a life and death situation for many folks to lose coverage for pre-existing conditions,” Bourdeaux said, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post. “Don’t you care about these folks or are you just too afraid to stand up to the leadership of the House and to the president?”

Woodall has publicly shot down Medicare for seniors, insisting it’s their fault if they don’t have insurance through an employer after they retire.

Last year, he ditched plans for a public town meeting when he found out there just might be some resistance to his support for Trump and Trump’s awful political agenda. Instead, he held an invite-only meeting with members of the local Tea Party chapter.

Congressional District 7 — which stretches from Snellville, through Lawrenceville and Duluth, up to Cumming — has historically leaned Republican, but recent polling shows that may be changing, especially as opposition to Trump grows in that area.

Now is the time to make sure you are registered to vote. And make sure your friends and family are registered to vote. Visit bit.ly/MVP-Ga to check your voter registration status and register to vote online.

And if you really want to make a difference, commit to becoming a Power Voter today, and help progressives turn out more voters to the polls than ever before.

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