For decades, Georgia politics has been a game for the patient.
You waited your turn, climbed the ladder, and if you were lucky it finally reached Washington somewhere around your fifties.
After this November, that old math is dead. If the election plays outlike I think it will, Georgia will send to the 120th Congress a Republican delegation featuring three members in their thirties: Brian Jack, 38, of the Third District; Jim Kingston, 36, of the First; and Houston Gaines, 31, of the 10th.
Let that sink in. Three Republican members of Congress from one state, all under 40.
Let’s start with Brian Jack, the elder statesman of the trio at 38. The Peachtree City native spent President Donald Trump’s first term as White House political director and won his seat in 2024.
In a few short years, he has become, in former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s words, “probably one of the top five most important members in Congress because he knows the White House.” White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles puts it more personally: “He’s like a baby brother to me, he’s like a son to the president.’“ Newt Gingrich, who knows something about Georgians rising fast, says simply: “The sky’s the limit.”
A confession of bias: in 2008, a young Brian Jack interned for Congressman Lynn Westmoreland, where I served as chief of staff and Brian Robinson, my deputy, made the hire. In spite of that very formative exposure to the two of us at a very young age, Brian Jack has gone on to become one of the most consequential members of the House.
How high, how fast? Jack is now widely viewed as the likely next chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign command post. If he gets it, he would be the first Georgian to hold the job since Speaker Gingrich tapped fellow Georgian John Linder to run the committee in 1997.
On the coast, Jim Kingston carries a name that needs no introduction. The son of former Congressman Jack Kingston won a Trump endorsement in April. “It is my Great Honor to endorse MAGA Warrior, Jim Kingston,” the president wrote, adding that “He and his family are fierce advocates for our movement.” Kingston and claimed the GOP nomination in May.
Ohio’s Jim Jordan, who came to Savannah to stump for him, called Kingston a “good man with the right kind of heart,” the “kind of guy you want in Congress, who will go fight.” The comparisons to his father are inevitable, but Jim has forged his own path as a hard worker and an even better listener, who has earned his standing in the community rather than inheriting it.
And then there is Houston Gaines, the baby of the group at 31. The eighth-generation Georgian from Athens has served in the state House since 2019, and his endorsement list reads like a House leadership org chart.
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Majority Leader Steve Scalise: “Houston Gaines built his career the right way … a principled conservative who gets results.” Whip Tom Emmer: “the type of America first conservative we need in Congress.” Trump praised him for “authoring more than 20 bills that have passed the Georgia Legislature” before delivering his complete and total Endorsement.
Here is the question worth asking: has any state ever seated three Republican members of Congress under 40 at once? Nobody keeps an official ledger of such things, but my research did not turn up much.
In today’s Congress, no state has even two Republican House members under 40. The six who qualify are scattered across six different states. You have to rewind nearly fifty years to Indiana in 1981, to find a clear parallel: freshman Sen. Dan Quayle, 33, alongside Reps. Dan Coats, 37, and John Hiler, 27. That Hoosier class produced a vice president in Quayle and, in Coats, both a senator and a director of national intelligence. That’s good company for Georgia’s trio to keep.
So, barring the unexpected, Georgia is about to field the youngest Republican congressional trio any state has produced since Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration. Add Clay Fuller, who claimed the 14th District seat in April, and the picture sharpens: this is no accident of one cycle but a generational changing of the guard. Fuller, mind you, is 45, which in this crowd practically qualifies him as the delegation’s wise old graybeard.
Every one of Trump’s endorsement posts ended with the same promise: “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” Time will render that verdict.
What is already certain: when the votes are counted in November, Georgia will not be waiting on its next generation of Republican leadership. It will have seated them, with committee assignments, leadership’s phone numbers, and thirty-odd years of runway ahead of them.
The old ladder took a lifetime to climb. This class took the elevator, and they are holding the door for the state they serve.
The future is now. It just got here early.
Chip Lake is a veteran Georgia-based Republican political strategist and consultant.
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