Georgia's 12th District Republicans will determine Tuesday who will face incumbent John Barrow in the congressional race come November.
       Candidates Ray McKinney and Carl Smith have spent the last three weeks campaigning in the district and across the state since they finished first and second in the July 20 primary. Tuesday will determine the fate for the two men who became candidates in very different ways.
      Smith has quietly built a grassroots effort with limited funding since entering the race about 16 months ago. At the time, Col. Wayne Mosley was his only primary opponent, but a legal action accusing Mosely of breach of contract for obeying an order to serve his country in Afghanistan caused him to drop out of the race to defend the allegation.
      Smith said he initially got involved with the congressional race to find a Republican to run against Barrow. As he looked around for people to run, he said he encountered more and more people who encouraged him to run and eventually he pulled the trigger.
      "I've been a party person from the background...but I wasn't someone who was knee deep in the party. I have actively supported other candidates for the past 15 or 20 years when I felt they were the right person for that position," Smith said. "I put my name on the ballot because I felt someone need to get out there and starting to raise issues and concerns about the lack of representation in our district and the direction of our country."
      Last September, activist and Republican operative Jeanne Seaver threw in her hat to face Smith, followed by retired financial banker and FBI instructor Mike Horner. Both would be defeated in the July 20 primary after receiving 18 and 11 percent of the votes, respectively.
      McKinney's entrance into the race was both more recent and longer ago. He originally ran for the district 12 seat in 2008 but lost to primary winner John Stone, who received 56.7 percent of the vote to McKinney's 31.9 percent. McKinney actually endorsed Smith in Jan. 2009 and didn't enter this year's race until the end of April when he said that none of the other three candidates were emerging as a viable candidate.
      "All the work we had done was about to go to waste," McKinney said. "So I talked with one of the candidates who'd I'd been helping and explained to him, ‘You've worked hard and I appreciate your values and this is nothing personal but this is a very, very valuable district, this is a very valuable seat and we have things in place that only we can kick-start.'"
      McKinney said he's been involved in politics for about three years with his first foray into politics being a run for president of the United States of America. He said he was so mad with Washintgont politics, he decided to file to run for president. He said that experience exposed him to people who liked his ideas and encouraged him to run for Congress.

      Since his 2008 bid, McKinney became a district and state GOP committee member and was elected as a delegate to the state, district and national conventions.
      Smith is a firefighter from Thunderbolt who until recently was serving as the town's fire chief. He served two terms as a Thunderbolt councilman, two terms as president of the Savannah Firefighters Association and two terms as the president of the Georgia Firefighters Association.
       Ironically, the biggest boost to Smith's campaign may have come from the Thunderbolt Council's decision to return to an all-volunteer fire department and eliminate the paid fire chief position effectively terminating Smith. At the time, the council members said it was budgetary, but Smith said he thought it was politically motivated. With a twist of his own, Smith returned as Thunderbolt's volunteer fire chief two weeks later since the bylaws governing the fire department state the volunteers elect their own chief.
      All the attention helped his name recognition, which eventually led to a second place finish in the primary, gathering up 27.9 percent of the district's primary votes to McKinney's 42.6 percent.
       For more information about the Smith campaign, visit www.carlsmithforcongress.com. For McKinney, visit www.raymckinney.org.
       Election Day for the primary run-off is Tuesday. Visit http://www.sos.georgia.gov/MVP/Login.aspx and fill out the short form to find the polling place for your voting precinct.