Mike Dugan, a 20-year Army veteran and local building contractor from Carrollton, will soon be able to add state senator to his résumé.
With all precincts reporting, Dugan posted a strong victory against Libertarian James Camp in a special election to determine the next state senator for District 30.
Voters in parts of three counties—Paulding, Douglas and Carroll—were able to cast ballots.
In Paulding, Dugan took 80.3 percent of the vote by earning 233 votes to Camp’s 57; voters from all four Paulding precincts favored the Republican candidate. The county saw 291 ballots cast out of 24,586 registered voters— a turnout of 1.18 percent.
Douglas also was decidedly in Dugan’s corner. Results from the Secretary of State’s office showed that with all precincts reporting, Dugan had 446 votes to Camp’s 102, or 81.4 percent of the vote.
Perhaps not surprising was that Dugan’s strongest showing was in his home county. He took 2,620 of the 2,928 votes there, or 89.5 percent of the vote.
Overall, Dugan had 3,299 votes to Camp’s 467, or 87.6 percent of the vote.
Today’s special election was a result of two elections from late last year. Dugan and Bill Hembree were the top two vote-getters in a Nov. 6 special election to determine who would replace Bill Hamrick on the GOP ticket after Hamrick was tapped by Gov. Nathan Deal to serve as superior court judge. Hembree earned the most votes in that four-man race, which also included Glenn Richardson and Jim Naughton, but was short the half-plus-one share of the vote needed to avoid the runoff against Dugan, his closest opponent.
But Dugan topped Hembree, formerly the State House representative from District 67, in a Dec. 4 runoff. Hembree in the election won over more voters in Paulding and Douglas counties, but Dugan carried his home county, which provided the most votes out of the three counties that have areas that make up the district.
Dugan’s December win put him in today’s race against Camp, the sole Libertarian candidate to qualify; no Democrats qualified for the seat.
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