Burt Jones and Rick Jackson have advanced to a run-off in Georgia’s Republican primary for governor, extending a bruising fight over who will represent the party in November’s midterm election.

Jones, Georgia’s lieutenant governor, and Jackson, a healthcare billionaire, will face each other again in the June 16 run-off after neither secured enough support to win the nomination outright following voting on Tuesday.

The winner will seek to replace Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who is barred by term limits from running again.

US President Donald Trump endorsed Jones last year, and Jones thanked him on Tuesday night. A victory for Jones would strengthen Trump’s influence in Georgia, a key battleground state where his record as a political kingmaker has been mixed.

Democrats are also choosing their nominee as they try to win the governor’s office for the first time since 1998.

The Democratic field includes former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Republican Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, former state Senator Jason Esteves and former state labour commissioner Mike Thurmond.

Jasmine Clark secures nomination in key Georgia House race

Separately, Democrat Jasmine Clark won her party’s nomination on Tuesday to succeed late Representative David Scott in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District after Scott died in April while seeking another term.

Clark, a state representative, microbiologist and lecturer at Emory University, has pledged to prioritise science policy in Congress. Her campaign was boosted by more than $2m in outside spending from cryptocurrency-linked groups, although Clark said she did not seek their support.

She is expected to be heavily favoured in November’s election, where Jonathan Chavez is set to become the Republican nominee after running unopposed in the primary.

Meanwhile, two-term Representative Mike Collins advanced to the Republican run-off in Georgia’s US Senate race.

Collins, 58, who owns a family trucking business and represents a district east of Atlanta, has closely aligned himself with Trump and describes himself as a “MAGA workhorse”. Immigration enforcement has been a central focus of his campaign.

Georgia Republicans are seeking a challenger to Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.

Among Collins’s rivals, representative Buddy Carter has highlighted his conservative record in Congress, while former college football coach Derek Dooley has presented himself as a political outsider.

Millions poured into Georgia governor race

More than $125m has been spent on advertising in the Republican primary for Georgia governor, with more than $66m of that spent by Jackson’s campaign, according to the latest figures from advertising-tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, Democrats running for governor have only spent about $4m.

Jones argues that his conservative record as a state senator and lieutenant governor, combined with Trump’s support, should make him the clear choice for Republican voters.

“I think Georgia just spoke, y’all,” Jones said at his election night party.

“The reason why I know we’re gonna win is because of friends and family members,” he said.

Jackson is betting that his outsider pitch will win over anti-establishment conservatives. On Tuesday night, he called Jones a political insider who is “working inside the system for his own benefit”.

“I cannot be bought, and I will not back down,” Jackson said.

The U.S.-designated Lebanon-based terrorist movement Hezbollah exploits children from its version of the scout movement to carry out jihadi missions that result in their deaths, according to a recent report on Lebanon’s MTV television network.

The Lebanese network’s report — translated by the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) — comes amid U.S.-brokered peace talks between Israel and Beirut.

The report claims that Hezbollah gives child fighters heroes’ funerals and publicly glorifies them before their peers in order to encourage other children to follow in their footsteps. The MTV report said Hezbollah believes that every drop of bloodshed by child soldiers brings victory closer.

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It also claimed that Hezbollah uses its scout movements to cultivate an entire generation of obedient children prepared to die, through rhetoric that glorifies death and martyrdom. The MTV report, according to the MEMRI translation, said that “Hezbollah child soldiers have been used since the 1980s by this outlaw armed group. Not just as armed fighters but as Khomeini-loyal scouts.”

The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, reportedly exploited the use of Iranian children during the country’s 1980-1988 war against Iraq.

Matthew Levitt, a leading scholar on Hezbollah from the Washington Institute, said that “Hezbollah’s recruitment and radicalization of youth through its Mahdi Scouts is long documented,” other experts talking to Fox News Digital concurred.

“Hezbollah has boy scouts, and they have been taught jihad, and it is a well-known thing in Lebanon,” Mideast expert Walid Phares told Fox News Digital.

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The Lebanon expert said they could be termed “children jihadists” who are preparing to become full Hezbollah fighters. Phares said they mostly assign them [the children of Hezbollah fighters] to spying and transporting ammunition. He argued if the scouts are getting funding from a ministry or national boy scouts association in Lebanon, they should be sanctioned if they have the evidence.

Multiple Fox News Digital Emails and phone calls to the World Organization of the Scouting Movement (WOSM) were not immediately returned. The U.S. branch of WOSM referred Fox News Digital to WOSM, which is in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

A Hezbollah expert from the Israel Alma Research and Education Center, Sarit Zehavi, called for action against the exploitation of children by the terror group.

“The only way to bring a change is to designate all of these allegedly civilian activities of Hezbollah and close the movement of its scouts, and enable the Shiites of Lebanon to have a different source of services, whether it is educational, formal or informal, which will be part of the Lebanese state, and not part of Hezbollah. The loyalty will be to the Lebanese state and not to Khomeini and the Islamic Republic.”

She added, “This is only something Lebanon can do with a lot of international pressure, of course, led by the United States.”

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An Israeli diplomat, Tammy Rahamimoff-Honig, posted on X: “Hezbollah sacrifices Lebanese children to further the ambitions of the Iranian regime. This isn’t ‘resistance’. It’s child abuse.”

Lebanon’s Ambassador to the U.S. declined to provide comment for this article.