With Georgia's governor's race still a dead heat on the eve of Election Day, both campaigns spent the final hours of early voting racing to squeeze out every last ballot in a contest that could end a Republican streak dating back to 2003.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution/University of Georgia poll conducted Oct. 7-15 among 1,000 likely voters found Republican Rick Jackson at 46% and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms at 45%, with 8% still undecided — a gap well inside the survey's 3.1-point margin of error. The race to succeed term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp has stayed essentially tied for months, despite Jackson significantly outspending Bottoms on the airwaves.

Friday marked the last day of in-person early voting, and Action News Jax reported that more than 2 million Georgians had already voted — outpacing early turnout in the 2022 midterms. Bottoms closed out a five-day "Georgia's Voice, Georgia's Vote" bus tour with a stop in Brunswick, while Jackson made a final push through rural counties he says Republicans need to turn out heavily to win.

Closing pitches

At her Brunswick stop, Bottoms detailed two of her signature proposals: slashing the state gas tax to 28 cents a gallon and the diesel tax to 31 cents, funded by tapping the state budget and reserves, and freezing new data-center construction pending a statewide review.

"I wanna make sure that we pause construction on new data centers so we can do a top to bottom assessment," — Keisha Lance Bottoms, Democratic nominee for Georgia governor, campaigning in Brunswick, Ga.

Jackson, for his part, kept his closing message short, telling supporters at his own stops that he appreciated their support and wanted their "prayers as well" heading into Tuesday.

The stakes go beyond policy. Republicans have held the Georgia governor's office continuously since Sonny Perdue's 2002 win broke more than a century of Democratic control, and a Bottoms victory would make her the state's first Black governor and first woman governor, according to WABE's campaign coverage. Jackson, a healthcare executive who beat Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in the GOP runoff, is betting that Georgia's rightward lean in recent statewide races holds even without Jones on the ballot.

With both camps describing the race as too close to call, polls open across Georgia at 7 a.m. Tuesday and close at 7 p.m. — results that will arrive alongside the state's marquee U.S. Senate contest as part of Georgia's broader midterm verdict.