The Democratic strategist James Carville used to say that “business” candidates were like bananas: the longer they stayed on the shelf, the worse they looked.
He made that comment back in the Guy Millner days, long before the rise of Donald Trump put a new spin on the concept of “business” candidates, which can be roughly defined as rich people who take their first shot at politics in some high-profile race.
Trump’s impact on the politics of “business” candidates was vividly illustrated last week by the entrance of billionaire healthcare executive Rick Jackson into the Republican gubernatorial primary. Jackson made his first public appearance in a glass elevator descending, a la Trump, into a cheering crowd. He called his primary opponent, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a traitor. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he’s allocated money for his ads to be aired in Washington and Florida, where Trump might see them.
That takes a lot of brass, considering that Trump has already endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in this race.
Time may eventually bear out Carville’s adage, but for the moment, it’s not Jackson, but Jones, who has a shelf-life problem. The lieutenant governor has been looked on as the solid frontrunner in this race for a very long time, long enough for a lot of money to accumulate against him.
For months, he’s been battered by a phantom foe, the unidentified contributors to Georgians for Integrity, which has spent millions on ads accusing Jones of corruption. Jackson arrived on the scene last week with a couple of slickly-made campaign ads already in the can, fresh as a banana on the day it was picked. The primary is May 19, not much time on the shelf.
Before the arrival of Jackson and the $50 million he brought with him, this was shaping up as a battle of one clearly-identified MAGA candidate, Jones, and two candidates — Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr — who would each make the argument they could appeal to a broader portion of General Election voters, and two other lesser candidates simply trying to introduce themselves. In other words, a kind of middle-leaning primary.
Now there’s the likelihood this will become a primary about which of the two front-running candidates can out-Trump the other, with all that could imply for the General Election. There’s no guarantee at all that Trump won’t change his mind if he senses a change in the wind, with all the chaos that would bring.
A poll published Monday by the Cygnal firm indicated Jackson has had an impact on the race in less than a week. Jones was at 22 percent, with Jackson already in second place with 16 percent, followed by Raffensperger with 10 and Carr with 7. That leaves a large undecided vote, which is not unusual at this stage. It also indicates, with Jones and Jackson at a combined 38 percent, that the MAGA core vote has neither grown nor contracted in the Georgia GOP.
“Mommy, why did you name me Brad?” a little kid asks his mom in one of Jackson’s first spots. Her twisted answer makes this one of the strangest political spots we’ll see in this or any year. “My second choice was Judas,” she says in closing.
In another spot, he talks about his hard-scrabble upbringing in terms that might even grab the fleeting attention of a Democrat. “Like President Trump, I don’t owe anybody anything,” he says.
The two ads, taken together, sound like a candidate with a lot of money to spend and no clear idea yet of how to spend it. But he’s already giving Jones a run for his money.
Meanwhile over the weekend, another Democratic candidate won a race in a district Trump won by double digits. This time it was in Louisiana, in a district that was ground-level Democratic even though it had voted for Trump three times. But Republicans thought they had a chance there and outspent the Democratic candidate three-to-one. A primary battle over which candidate is Trumpier may not be what Georgia Republicans need right now.
