Nick Millwood Has a Civics Problem
His flagship issue is that a legislator showed too much restraint and it falls apart the moment you ask one question
Nick Millwood wants you to be angry at Mitchell Horner. He just needs you to not think too hard about why.
The Ringgold mayor and newly qualified candidate for the Republican nomination for Georgia House District 3 has built his campaign launch around a single accusation: that Representative Mitchell Horner was “too silent” during the Catoosa County GOP ballot dispute in spring of 2024. Millwood told the Catoosa County News that Horner should have done something when the local party tried to screen some local candidates off the 2024 primary ballot.
He has posted on Facebook accusing the Catoosa County Republican Party of trying to “steal citizens’ political power.” [To be clear, I think the Catoosa GOP was wrong during the 2024 primary.] His stated campaign priorities include voter rights to choose candidates without the interference of political parties. It sounds great on a campaign flyer or a 30 second campaign sales pitch. It falls apart the second you ask a follow-up question.
Here is the follow-up: What, specifically, was Representative Mitchell Horner supposed to do?
Not in the abstract. Not in the vague language of campaign rhetoric. Concretely. What action was a state legislator supposed to take when two groups of citizens in his county disagreed about what Georgia election law allows?
Because that is what happened.
The Catoosa County Republican Party believed O.C.G.A. 21-2-153 and the First Amendment gave them the right to vet candidates seeking their party’s ballot line. The candidates who were denied believed the statute sets the qualifying requirements and the party cannot add to them. Both sides hired lawyers. Both sides went to court. A Superior Court judge ruled. The party appealed. The case went to federal court. It went to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The 11th Circuit sent it back. The state court issued a permanent injunction. Nine committee members were held in willful contempt.
The system handled it the way it was designed to do.
Multiple courts across multiple levels of the judiciary examined the law, weighed the arguments, and issued rulings. The candidates who were blocked got on the ballot. Three of them won. The party’s qualifying affidavit was struck down. The contempt fines were assessed. The permanent injunction was entered. Every mechanism that exists to resolve a legal dispute between citizens was engaged, and every one of them functioned.
So again: What was any state legislator supposed to do?
Millwood’s answer is that Rep. Horner should have introduced legislation. He should have passed a law. He should have used the power of state government to intervene in a local party dispute and make sure one side won before the courts could finish their work.
A candidate running as a Republican in one of the most conservative districts in Georgia is arguing that the correct response to a legal dispute between citizens was more government. More legislation. More state intervention. He is asking you to believe that a state representative who respected the independence of the judiciary and let the legal process play out was derelict in his duty. And that the better approach would have been to send politicians in Atlanta scrambling to rewrite the rules before a judge could weigh in. That is not a conservative position.
I do not care what letter is next to your name on the ballot. If your first instinct when citizens disagree about what a law means is to demand that the legislature rewrite the law and expand the power and scope of government before the courts can interpret the law and dispute, you are not describing limited government. You are describing its opposite.
There is something else worth noting that I wrote about already. Nick Millwood pulled a Democratic primary ballot in 2016. He pulled a Democratic primary ballot again in 2018. The 2016 Democratic presidential primary featured Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary produced Stacey Abrams as the nominee. Not exactly beacons of conservative limited government thinking. But perfectly legal thing to do and his choice.
But a man who twice chose Democratic primary ballots in two of the most consequential Republican primaries in recent history is now running as a Republican on a platform that amounts to: the state government should have intervened faster and harder in a local dispute. More government. His flagship issue is that a conservative state legislator showed too much restraint. His core complaint is that the courts and judges were allowed to do their jobs without legislative interference.
Now. Here is the part where I am going to be more honest than Millwood is capable of being. I was opposed to and remain opposed to what the Catoosa GOP did and I believe some of their leadership had misguided personal reasons as part of their driving justifications but they were not entirely wrong about the problem. They identified something real and in need of addressing. They just built a terrible mechanism to fix it.
For most of American history, political parties picked their own nominees. Conventions, caucuses, backroom negotiations, party bosses with cigars and grudges. The presidential primary election as we know it did not exist in any meaningful form until the Progressive Era, and it did not dominate the nominating process until the 1970s.
What happened over that century was that the parties outsourced their most important internal function, choosing who carries their name on the ballot, to the general public. Across the country there are variety of methods in use. In a closed-primary state, that means outsourcing it to registered party members. In an open-primary state like Georgia, it means outsourcing it to anyone who walks in and asks for your ballot on Election Day. That is an extraordinary transfer of power.
It is also a trade-off that most voters never think about, because primaries feel as natural as general elections now. But they are not the same thing. A general election is a public act of self-governance. A primary is, at its core, a private organization deciding who represents it. We have just become so used to letting the public handle it that we forgot it was ever the party’s job. And that matters.
The Catoosa GOP looked at Georgia’s open primary system, looked at the fact that anyone can pull a Republican ballot regardless of whether they have ever voted Republican before, and asked a reasonable question: What stops someone with no meaningful attachment to party principles from running under the party name in a district where the Republican nomination is the only election that matters?
That is not a paranoid question. In a county that voted 77 percent for Trump, winning the Republican primary is winning the seat. The general election is a formality. If your primary is open to all comers and your district is a one-party lock, then the primary is functionally the election, and the party has no gatekeeping mechanism at all.
The Catoosa GOP and many others in Georgia and elsewhere saw that problem and tried to fix it. The Catoosa solution was a disaster. A 16-member committee with a secret interview process and a notarized affidavit requirement is not prudential transparent scrutiny and party governance. It is a bad nightclub with a bouncer with an inferiority complex. Think Roadhouse but no Patrick Swayze.
It concentrated enormous power in a tiny group, lacked transparency, defied a court order, and ultimately cost the party $71,000 in legal fees, contempt citations for nine members, and a permanent injunction. The candidates they blocked got on the ballot anyway. Three of them won. The mechanism failed on its own terms before it failed in court.
But the fact that the Catoosa GOP built the wrong solution does not mean they asked the wrong question. The tension between open primaries and party principles and identity is real and it is older than anyone reading this. Smart people have been arguing about it for decades. There is no clean or easy solution.
Closed primaries create their own problems. Party registration requirements in a state without party registration would require a wholesale rewrite of Georgia election law (the option I prefer). Convention systems are sometimes shady and favor insiders. Every option involves trade-offs.
Which brings us back to Nick Millwood, who has managed to position himself on the wrong side of every layer of this question simultaneously. He is attacking the screening process while benefiting from the open primary system that made the screening question relevant in the first place. He is a man who pulled Democratic primary ballots in 2016 and 2018 seeking the Republican nomination in a district where that nomination is the only prize worth having. He is the case study the Catoosa GOP was worried about, running on a platform that says the Catoosa GOP had no right to worry in the first place.
And his answer to all of it is that a state legislator should have passed a law. More government. More intervention. More politicians in Atlanta telling local citizens and local courts and local judges how to sort out their own business. The Catoosa GOP recognized a real issue and got the answer badly wrong. Millwood is not even admitting the possibility an issue exists. His case rests entirely on the assumption that voters will not bother to question it. The argument falls apart the moment anyone checks it. He is hoping no one does.