The statement that “democracy is on the ballot in 2024″ may have no more literal example than that of state Sen. Shawn Still’s upcoming race. Still is a first-term Republican lawmaker from Johns Creek who is currently under indictment, along with former President Donald Trump and 13 others on charges involving his alleged role in efforts to overturn the election in Georgia in 2020.
Still is being challenged by Ashwin Ramaswami, a 24-year-old Democrat and law student from Johns Creek who worked in election security during the same 2020 election that Still is still dealing with.
Still was reserved and all business during an interview this week in a conference room at his pool contracting business in Norcross. He said he can’t discuss the details of the Fulton County case against him, which stems from his role as a Trump elector. But he said he never considered not running for reelection after he was indicted.
“I think that, for my kids, for my company, for my friends and family that have supported me, the only way to truly prove my innocence in all of it was to run for reelection, get reelected and prove that all the charges were false,” he said.
Senate District 48, which he and Ramaswami are competing for, includes portions of fast-growing north Fulton, Forsyth and Gwinnett counties — and it may be as close to a toss-up district as the state Senate has.
Before lawmakers redrew the district’s lines in 2021, Democrat Michelle Au had just won the seat that former Georgia GOP Chairman David Shafer held before. Once reconfigured, Gov. Brian Kemp and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock both won the district, while Still won his race by 14 points.
As unsettled as the politics are in the bustling suburban area, those numbers don’t quite capture the state of the race today, with Still under indictment and being challenged by a well-funded, young Democrat.
As soon as Ramaswami got into the race, he began to connect with other young liberals across the country. They’ve not only gotten behind his cause, but they also plowed more than $100,000 into his campaign and helped him land high-profile cable news hits on MSNBC.
Still said “there’s no question he’s a smart kid — I mean, he’s got a great pedigree of colleges.”
“But experience matters significantly when you’re dealing with such a culturally, racially, economically diverse district that we have,” Still said.
Along with attending Georgetown Law School, Ramaswami graduated from Stanford University in 2021. And he points to the district’s diverse ethnic makeup as one more reason he thinks he could knock off Still. Just over half of residents in the district are white, but 28% are Asian and 8% Black. And nearly a third are foreign-born like his parents.
“These are people who I grew up with, and like, I know these people, they will support me ... someone they trust,” he said, noting that his parents immigrated from India
After working as an intern and then as a part-time employee in election cybersecurity for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he said he applied to Georgetown to eventually apply his tech background to public policy.
But “eventually” came sooner than expected when he realized during a school project on Trump electors in Wisconsin that he grew up in the same Georgia district as one of the Trump electors himself. “The first time I ever heard of Shawn Still was when he was indicted, which I think says a lot,” Ramaswami said.
He now lives in his family’s home in Johns Creek while finishing his law degree in Washington two days a week. He’s been campaigning on top of that, but he said he didn’t want to wait to run.
“My story was exactly a perfect fit because I’d actually worked on election security,” Ramaswami said. “I worked under both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations with this history of bipartisanship, whereas Shawn Still was doing all these extreme things on the right.”
Still’s track record is as a more moderate Republican in the state Senate. He voted mostly with Republicans but said he always reached out to a Democrat to co-sponsor bills he took the lead on. He pointed to state Sens. Sonya Halpern and Jason Esteves, both Atlanta Democrats, as two who co-sponsored his primary bills.
“I’m a conservative person, but I’m going to make sure that everything that I support is not some radicalized agenda,” he said. “Rather, (it) is strictly focused on what I think is what the folks that live in my district, but also in the state, are looking for in their leaders.”
So far, the bills he sponsored have been more Chamber of Commerce than pitchforks and torches. In fact he was awarded “Freshman Legislator of the Year” by the Georgia Chamber in 2023.
Unlike the most pro-Trump candidates in 2022, his flyers never mentioned “election integrity” and he never endorsed the Trump-backed primary ticket that year either.
But did Joe Biden win fair and square? It’s the one question he did not answer definitely during our interview.
He said he does not dispute the fact that Biden is the president, but he added: “There were discrepancies for sure. And I think there were things that made people ask questions.”
Asked whether the election was stolen, he said, “I’ve never been someone who has been militant about what did or didn’t happen. ... I’ve never called for anyone’s removal from office or anything else like that. I have been the consummate rule follower.”
Like Ramaswami, Still agreed that democracy is on the ballot in his race, just not in the way that Ramaswami says.
“In broad terms, democracy is always on the line because you have to have a fair and safe election, that you trust the results, and that you got the right person elected,” he said.
Voters in District 48 will have that chance in November.
