State Rep. Matt Dollar, who filed the East Cobb cityhood bill in the Georgia legislature earlier this year, has at least one announced opponent in 2020.
She’s Sara Tindall Ghazal, an attorney who has headed a voter access project for the Georgia Democratic Party since last year.
On her campaign website, Ghazal said she’s running for several reasons, including improving voter access, health care and education.
Ghazal and her husband Patrick are raising two daughters who attend public school in East Cobb. She opposes cityhood and says that “Georgians deserve better policy when it comes to common sense gun safety.”
Ghazal was hired last year by the Georgia Democratic Party as the first full-time director for voter protection by a state party.
The move was made as Georgia Democrats challenged voter access when current Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp was Secretary of State.
She’s been an elections monitor for the Carter Center in Jamaica, Liberia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and the Cherokee Nation. Ghazal is a graduate of the University of the South and earned a law degree from the Emory University School of Law.
According to Dollar’s latest financial report, filed on June 30 with the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, he has nearly $50,000 in cash on hand.
The same agency indicates that Ghazal registered her campaign committee, Friends of Sara Tindall Ghazal, on Nov. 27, and that her campaign chair is Charisse Davis, who represents the Walton and Wheeler clusters on the Cobb Board of Education.
East Cobb News has reached out to Ghazal seeking more information about her candidacy.
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She’s the latest Democratic political novice to seek elected office in Republican-heavy East Cobb.
Dollar, who’s represented District 45 since 2003, has had little opposition from opponents in either party. Last year, he defeated Democrat Essence Johnson with 60 percent of the vote.
Democrats fielded candidates in every federal, state and local race involving East Cobb constituencies last year, and they won in the 6th Congressional District (Lucy McBath), Cobb Board of Education Post 6 (Charisse Davis) and Georgia State House 37 (Mary Frances Williams).
Democrats also ran close in Cobb Commission District 3 and State House 43. Those candidates seeking office again in 2020. Caroline Holko, who ran against commissioner JoAnn Birrell, is running for State House District 46, where Republican John Carson is the incumbent.
In State House 43, Republican incumbent Sharon Cooper, the chairwoman of the House Health and Human Services Committee, is being challenged again by Democrat Luisa Wakeman, who got 48 percent of the vote against Cooper in 2018.
In addition to the area of East Cobb shown below, District 45 also includes a small portion of Sandy Springs.
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